Correlation is not causation

Recently, Google Correlate launched.

Google Correlate is cool, and probably useful. This post is neither of those things. But it did amuse me.

So, wanting to try it out with something that ought to be data-rich with search queries aplenty, I typed “kittens”.

Look at this:

Google Correlate, results for "Kittens"

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So, kittens correlate strongly with Mango Chutney. Fair enough. There’s probably a recipe in there somewhere that I can get behind.

But does mango chutney correlate with kittens?

Google Correlate, results for "mango chutney"

Not so much, no.

I’m sure we’ve all… umm… learned something?

Go Phish

This recently clawed its way through my spam filter – it’s quietly impressive in its way:

(click to expand. And yes, I should get a lightbox plugin. I’ll sort it out)

Listen, iTards, it’s not all about you

There’s an adage about having a hammer and problems looking like nails. It’s one of those pithy soundbites that oleaginous lifestyle guru pondscum like to tweet a lot.

There’s also some truth in it. Look at this tweet that got on my tits:

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Right. Yes, because so many people have an iPad as their only device, and it’s a great platform for getting work done on. So much so that fifteen million people use it exclusively whenever they want to buy anything. All of them. From people buying books to B2B hardware purchases.

Sweet twat-lips of Cthulhu. Kill me now.

Sure, flash needs to die. But can we kill it without the lazy, self-congratulatory, mobile-infatuated circle jerk? Please?

Rhetorical exaggeration is one thing, but this smacks of a reluctance to raise your eyes above your navel. It’s going on everywhere, too.

Here’s a much better article about the problem, from somebody who swears less: The Real Lesson of Cisco’s Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle

(I’m sure, well, I hope, that the original tweeter meant well. But I’m incredibly fucking tired of seeing this kind pithy-rather-than-useful commentary)

IBM – WTF?

IBM’s current big thing is their Smarter Planet idea. It’s pretty cool.

Oh, it’d be cooler if it really were the first steps to some kind of mad Sci-Fi, gaia hypothesis, planetary sentience, Olaf Stapeldon malarkey, but it’s a start.

Basically, you instrument the fuck out of everything, then let emergent complexity take its course.

Also, guys, you can have that tagline for free*, since it beats the tits off your current campaigns:

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To be honest, cyber-pachyderm-man notwithstanding, this isn’t that bad. But it also isn’t a very obvious ad to be running alongside lifestyle journalism. I found this as jarring as the Oracle product placement in Iron Man 2.

 

*You can’t actually have that for free, but I’ll probably take payment in booze.

Dear Oracle, please stop emailing me

I stopped working on anything Oracle-related a while ago, but bless them, they do like to stay in touch.

I tried asking them not to, but it’s surprisingly difficult:

I don’t want to have to log in to get rid of the email. Nobody does. Heck, I can’t even remember my login details, if I ever had any.

It is also breath-takingly arrogant.

Where’s the “No, fuck this shit, just unsubscribe me” button, eh?

On definitions, and T-Mobile’s rather interesting fair use policy

Another reader submission. Here’s a nominal help article that goes heroically beyond failing to help.

Yes, T-Mobile, if you re-define the problem it’ll just go away…

Who is this meant to help? Heck, who is this meant to fool…

Quite apart from being very, very annoying, there’s a serious problem here with lack of clarity around useful information. Of the two legitimate questions (“what’s the usage cap?” and “what happens when I go over it?”), only one is really answered, and not in a very useful way.

Without the embarrassing attempt at face-saving and doublespeak, this whole thing could be condensed down to:

“You’ve got 500 MB, and after that your bandwidth gets throttled. Now fuck off”

Asshats.

Check-box smallpox

A reader submission today.

This is from a survey about the performance of libraries in an academic insitution.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it’s almost impossible to read. Perhaps more importantly – what the fuck does anybody hope to learn from this?

Staring at it for a while, I started to go a bit peculiar. Then I remembered that it reminded me of something even worse.

Yeah, you guessed – it’s Author-IT:

Worst software ever.

It Gets Better

Good things don’t end up here; this is a place for crappy things. So what’s the beef with It Gets Better? It’s a good thing, right? Well, yes, but not unequivocally so – there are a couple of big things wrong with it. And since the bad things that end up here come with pissy little notes about why, I figure it’s fair game.

This is a slightly sell-out, weasel-words moment for me. It’s where I “oppose the war but support our troops”. Well, actually, it’s more like the other way round, but that hasn’t descended into cliché yet, and in any case makes you sound like a sociopath. So yeah, I support the idea behind It Gets Better, but some of the execution is broken.

Every single It Gets Better video I’ve seen, be it the original (which is still fantastically touching and useful), the Google one, the Facebook one, the even more cynical self-promoting celebrity ones, or my personal favourite, parses down to a simple three-point message:

1. Don’t kill yourself, please.
2. Your life will suck for the foreseeable future and you can’t change that.
3. It gets better if you move out of that one-horse shithole and join the urban middle class.

These things might be true, but I’m furious about being asked to accept them.

Apart from the first one. I think there are too many humans, but even I can’t fault the first one. Kids – don’t kill yourselves. The other two are broken.

While the majority of institutions, and schools in particular, continue to treat victims of homophobic bullying as themselves culpable, point 2 there is going to stick around.  But for fuck’s sake let’s not accept that.

And take point 3: is “Sod the proles, move to the big city and be fabulous, darling” really the best we can do?

I’m not saying it doesn’t work.  Being bourgeois in the affluent South-East of England is working out just dandy for me, thank you very much; and I wouldn’t go back to Darlington if you doubled my salary. Ok, that’s not just a gay thing. But it’s hardly a progressive message, and it’s certainly not easy, extensible, or sustainable.

What if you don’t want to leave Middlesbrough? What if you’ve looked at both Richmonds and like the one with fields? Even if we accept the idea that leaving is an inherent good, how about folks with no realistic prospect of getting out of Sunderland?

This is a broken idea as grimy and insidious as any social mobility fantasy belched out by the “progressive” right. Baked into it is the notion – linked to the problem with point 2 – that you can’t improve your world, nor would it be desirable; no, improvement comes from joining ours.

Now, I’m not attributing a belief that snide and unpleasant to everyone (or really anyone) who’s made an It Gets Better video. But I do worry that in rushing to celebrate the fact that our lives have got better, we risk glossing over the fact that lots of us had to make some fairly substantial changes to make them better. It’s hard to imagine I’d be anywhere near as happy if I were still living on a run-down North-Eastern council estate. And I definitely can’t imagine I’d ever have had the will to tough it out and try and make things better there. I’m not that strong. But should the message be that I’d have to be?

So yes, leaving is an option. It’s a realistic and valid one for some people. But it’s not a solution to the problem, and it’s not an aspiration we should find palatable.

I worry that the message people will take away from this tremendously hopeful, and more-or-less universally well-intentioned project is one that they must accept the realities of homophobic abuse as unchangeable, that the only solution is to run away. Again, it does work. It is an option. But it isn’t an option for everyone, and it doesn’t help anyone you leave behind.

There is a caveat. Stonewall have tweaked the message and brought it into their wider campaign against homophobic bullying. There’s a lot less wrong with the idea that It Gets Better Today, and they are campaigning to change things in context rather than encouraging people to change their contexts. That’s great – give them some money

I’m also ignoring the fact that it does get better. Many people do tend to be a bit nicer to each-other as they get older. So, yeah, the humans don’t entirely suck, and life isn’t unremittingly horrible; not even in Darlington. But we clearly can’t rely on that.

So, yeah, here’s me loitering by the sacred cow enclosure, sheepishly trying to conceal a bolt-gun, I guess. I don’t think It Gets Better is a bad thing, but I’m really, really, concerned that its hope may conceal a profound ideological failure.

Define “required”

I’m not sure Thetrainline.com and I share the same definition of “required”.

 

I’d actually be ok with “reservation not possible”. It would feel a lot less arrogant, and a lot more honest.

Sure, I’d be curious about why, but hey, it’s a start.

STFU, Noob – O2 on Yahoo on the HD7

Somewhere more professional, where I say “fuck” a little less, I’ll be blogging about my new HD7 later this week. The short version: it’s pretty good.

For now, I’d like to call attention to some particular shit-for-brains UX and customer care from O2.

The global search on the HD7 is Bing. No surprises. If you buy it from O2, however, the in-browser search takes you to the garden of user experience delight that is a Yahoo search/portal page.

As far as I can tell, you can’t uninstall this.

Some brave soul called them on this on their forums

The response is… special: