I've discovered a new mathematical formula today. It expresses the relevance of the internet, and I have calculated it to be 0.1%.
How did I do this? Quite simply. I took the 300,000 people who said on Facebook that they would march to the French Embassy to protest against the thieving of our World Cup place and divided that number by the 300 or so who actually turned up.
This little illustration firstly confirms the old gag that internet petitions aren't worth the paper they're written on. But it also reveals the extent to which posturing has replaced action in the repertoire of modern man.
Perhaps we are much more cowed, more frightened, more afraid to rock the boat than previous generations. Perhaps we are more lazy, more indoors, more sedentary too.
But primarily I think we're more inclined to spoof and bluster and posture than previous generations, and few things fulfil that remit better than the 'look at me' amateurism of the internet, especially (yes, I know) blogs and social networking sites.
We already know that such things aren't work. They aren't proper communication either. And if they're what passes for fun in the 21st century, I'd like to be put on the first bus back to the 20th, please.
So what are they? A billion electronic clamours for attention? Hard to say. One thing is increasingly sure though. The internet doesn't matter, and what you read there is almost definitely bullshit, unless it was nicked from some more trustworthy offline source.
How bullshit? Well, on the basis of my calculations at the French Embassy today, somewhere around 99.9% bullshit (unless I somehow missed a quarter of a million people in my count.)
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Ireland is the most socially networked country on Earth
Social networking sites have been found to be national entities. And Ireland is the most socially networked country on the planet.
What do I mean? Sites like Bebo, Facebook and so on are in fact limited by national interests. Not one social networking site is genuinely global, with most limited from expanding into other countries by language barriers.
This study found that, inevitably, Ireland had the highest usage of social networking sites of any nation on Earth, as well as being Bebo's spiritual home.
But the study also reveals that social networking sites are becoming nationally limited in scope. Irish people use Bebo, Americans use MySpace (remember that?), Facebook is biggest in Turkey and Canada, Google's Orkut is big in Brazil, whereas India is the most LinkedIN.
What the study sadly doesn't reveal is why so many people still persist with such a moronic method of interacting. Maybe the Aliens will enlighten us when they start posting on Bebo.
What do I mean? Sites like Bebo, Facebook and so on are in fact limited by national interests. Not one social networking site is genuinely global, with most limited from expanding into other countries by language barriers.
This study found that, inevitably, Ireland had the highest usage of social networking sites of any nation on Earth, as well as being Bebo's spiritual home.
But the study also reveals that social networking sites are becoming nationally limited in scope. Irish people use Bebo, Americans use MySpace (remember that?), Facebook is biggest in Turkey and Canada, Google's Orkut is big in Brazil, whereas India is the most LinkedIN.
What the study sadly doesn't reveal is why so many people still persist with such a moronic method of interacting. Maybe the Aliens will enlighten us when they start posting on Bebo.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Words that English is missing
Did you ever invent your own word?
I did.
English is a very adaptable language. It has in previous times incorporated large chunks of classical Greek, Latin, French, Germanic Saxon, Celtic and other languages into its lexicon.
This adaptibility may well be why, alongside British and American imperialism, that English is well on its way to becoming the first genuinely global language.
But there are still concepts in existence that English is lacking words for.
One great example is the joy of witnessing someone else's pain. Only the Germans could have identified the need for such a word, and they did. They call it 'schadenfreude'. And English has gleefully borrowed it.
But there are still many concepts missing a word to define them. So when we were young, we used to create our own.
These weren't dialect terms, or even, God forbid, Ulster-Scots. These were words that me and my mates made up when we were young to explain concepts that just don't have an official word in English.
One was SKRINGELY. Anything that makes you feel so uncomfortable that you have to move around slightly is skringely. Like when your parents sit you down to tell you the facts of life, or when a really ugly chick asks you out. Looking at gross pictures of stuff in science class could be skringely for the more squeamish. Listening to the blow-by-blow account of your gay mate's love life is also generally pretty skringely too.
A cognate term to skringely is SCRINKLE. You scrinkle about in bed on hot, sweaty, muggy nights. You scrinkle when an insect lands on your back and you jerk about trying to get rid of it. Scrinkling is any jerky movement aimed at providing comfort.
One great word we used that I reckon the English language needs to adopt is the verb TO BABOON. This describes an action regularly seen among the knackers, chavs, spides and scumbags of the world.
If you've ever seen baboons in the wild or in zoos, having a drink or some food, they're constantly spinning their heads back and forth over their shoulders suspiciously, for fear that they might get attacked from behind by another baboon.
It's exactly the same with scumbags. If you ever watch a bunch of street corner kids, hanging around of an evening, they constantly baboon. Heads jerk back and forth, scanning the territory for anyone they don't want to encounter, like parents, police or parole officers.
But possibly the best word we ever coined was actually a resurrection of an older English hunting term. Our modern word 'scum' comes directly from an antiquated word for fox excrement, which was called scomb.
From this came the hunting term scomber or scumber, which mean to NOT step in fox excrement. The reason you don't want to do this when hunting is because the dogs follow the smell of the fox poo, and they start thinking that you're the fox.
But it dawned on us that a word for narrowly avoiding ending up in the shit is something with many more uses outside of the narrow world of fox hunting. So we adopted the verb TO SCUMBER as having that wider meaning.
You could be shagging some young one in her parents' house when the front door goes. If you quickly manage to get your kit on and get out the window before angry daddy storms the bedroom, then you've successfully scumbered out of a potentially dangerous situation.
You've scumbered again when you screw up at work but someone else cops the blame, or you manage to get things sorted before the boss finds out. There are a myriad of potential uses of the verb to scumber, limited only by the amount of shit that human beings nearly find themselves in, but end up avoiding by a hair's breadth.
Those were some of our words, and I still find myself using them, much to the bemusement of those who listen to me.
And I haven't stopped making up words for things that lack their own terms in English. Most recently, I coined Asbopop.
Did any of you interweb people ever invent some words of your own which fill a hole in the English language?
Let's hear them!
I did.
English is a very adaptable language. It has in previous times incorporated large chunks of classical Greek, Latin, French, Germanic Saxon, Celtic and other languages into its lexicon.
This adaptibility may well be why, alongside British and American imperialism, that English is well on its way to becoming the first genuinely global language.
But there are still concepts in existence that English is lacking words for.
One great example is the joy of witnessing someone else's pain. Only the Germans could have identified the need for such a word, and they did. They call it 'schadenfreude'. And English has gleefully borrowed it.
But there are still many concepts missing a word to define them. So when we were young, we used to create our own.
These weren't dialect terms, or even, God forbid, Ulster-Scots. These were words that me and my mates made up when we were young to explain concepts that just don't have an official word in English.
One was SKRINGELY. Anything that makes you feel so uncomfortable that you have to move around slightly is skringely. Like when your parents sit you down to tell you the facts of life, or when a really ugly chick asks you out. Looking at gross pictures of stuff in science class could be skringely for the more squeamish. Listening to the blow-by-blow account of your gay mate's love life is also generally pretty skringely too.
A cognate term to skringely is SCRINKLE. You scrinkle about in bed on hot, sweaty, muggy nights. You scrinkle when an insect lands on your back and you jerk about trying to get rid of it. Scrinkling is any jerky movement aimed at providing comfort.
One great word we used that I reckon the English language needs to adopt is the verb TO BABOON. This describes an action regularly seen among the knackers, chavs, spides and scumbags of the world.
If you've ever seen baboons in the wild or in zoos, having a drink or some food, they're constantly spinning their heads back and forth over their shoulders suspiciously, for fear that they might get attacked from behind by another baboon.
It's exactly the same with scumbags. If you ever watch a bunch of street corner kids, hanging around of an evening, they constantly baboon. Heads jerk back and forth, scanning the territory for anyone they don't want to encounter, like parents, police or parole officers.
But possibly the best word we ever coined was actually a resurrection of an older English hunting term. Our modern word 'scum' comes directly from an antiquated word for fox excrement, which was called scomb.
From this came the hunting term scomber or scumber, which mean to NOT step in fox excrement. The reason you don't want to do this when hunting is because the dogs follow the smell of the fox poo, and they start thinking that you're the fox.
But it dawned on us that a word for narrowly avoiding ending up in the shit is something with many more uses outside of the narrow world of fox hunting. So we adopted the verb TO SCUMBER as having that wider meaning.
You could be shagging some young one in her parents' house when the front door goes. If you quickly manage to get your kit on and get out the window before angry daddy storms the bedroom, then you've successfully scumbered out of a potentially dangerous situation.
You've scumbered again when you screw up at work but someone else cops the blame, or you manage to get things sorted before the boss finds out. There are a myriad of potential uses of the verb to scumber, limited only by the amount of shit that human beings nearly find themselves in, but end up avoiding by a hair's breadth.
Those were some of our words, and I still find myself using them, much to the bemusement of those who listen to me.
And I haven't stopped making up words for things that lack their own terms in English. Most recently, I coined Asbopop.
Did any of you interweb people ever invent some words of your own which fill a hole in the English language?
Let's hear them!
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Internet Alphabet
Okay, so I was bored. Sue me.I typed the letter 'S' into my Firefox browser earlier on in order to call up this blog. Like other browsers, the cache remembers sites, so it was my lazy way of getting to the blog in as few moves as possible.
But instead of waiting for the cache to call up anything beginning with 'S', I impatiently hit search, and was gobsmacked to find that the letter 'S' links, for no apparent reason, to this page, which was definitely not what I was looking for.
That got me wondering what the rest of the alphabet links to via Firefox, so being bored, I compiled the entire alphabet for you below. Now perhaps things are different over in Explorer or Opera land, and perhaps things are different where you are, but this is the alphabet I found:
A is for a list of web resources for programmers
B is for academic Physics papers
C is for the programming language C
D is for more Physics papers
E is for Hollywood gossip
F is for businesses going under
G is for Google mail
H is for graphics cards for gamers
I is for a Youtube imitator
J is for Jennifer Lopez
K is for some Linux operating system guff
L is for the Council of Europe!!!
M is for Fritz Lang's classic
N is for teen TV shows
O is for more nerd techie stuff
P is for pop singer Pink
Q is for Q music magazine
R is for statistical computing
S is for McDonald's junkfood???
T is for Local transport in Massachussets
U is for a Canadian University
V is for Warner's movie mangling of 'V for Vendetta'
W is for a business hotel chain
X is for yet more open source, techie nerd stuff
Y is for Yahoo
Z is for dissident US political magazine ZMag
I presume somewhere along the line people are paying to buy up the alphabet online. That would explain the preponderance of entertainment and techie sites.
But can anyone confirm to me how browsers decide on a website based on a single letter?
And even better, can anyone explain why McDonald's bought the letter 'S'?
And do you get anything different in your internet alphabet?
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