Quote of the week!

[Disembodied]

OOH LOOK SHINY! (Internet of Things is to the 21st century as radium salts were to the 1920s.)

This is in relation to stories such as J&J warns diabetic patients - Insulin pump vulnerable to hacking, and people asking why anybody would be so stupid as to hook up things that can kill you to the internet.

[Cody]

Hurricane winds increase very rapidly with height, and residents of high-rise buildings are at particular risk of strong winds. Winds at the top of a 30-story building will average one Saffir-Simpson category higher than the winds near the surface.

Crikey!

[Cody]

Microsoft's Dave Coplin, the firm's “chief envisioning officer” was quoted as saying that a governmental “safety net” was needed to protect humanity from the Rise of the Machines.

Some job title, that!

[Cody]

US singer Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first songwriter to win the prestigious award.
The 75-year-old rock legend received the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

Cool! Hard to find a usable Dylan song on YT - but the Hendrix cover of All Along the Watchtower will do nicely! Of which Dylan said:

"It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day."

[Cody]

He was forced into an unforced error!

[Smivs]

Yeah, those football pundits really do have a way with words!

[Cody]

Don't they just - that same pundit also said something like: they're victims of their own downfall. <sniggers>


Meanwhile...

The Walloonatics, they might say, have taken over the asylum.

[Cody]

All you need to know about Selfie takers is that more of them die while taking Selfies than normal people die from shark attacks each year.

F**k Selfies!

[maik]

All you need to know about Selfie takers is that more of them die while taking Selfies than normal people die from shark attacks each year.

What a surprise, given that more people die from almost anything than from shark attacks each year

[phkb]

Including, apparently, being crushed by a vending machine!

[Redspear]

Vending machines are probably sneakier...

[Cody]

Don't know about sneaky, but the Irn Bru vending machine at the end of this clip (0:57) is definitely vicious!

[Cody]

"Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic,” he wrote.

<guffaws>

[Disembodied]

Well, they could be authentic AND fake … it's not like Facebook is responsible for what people share. And when you get actual newspapers inventing news:

Sun and Mail Online both take down stories claiming Jeremy Corbyn was 'dancing a jig' on way to Cenotaph

or going beyond just cropping photos to create politically motivated propaganda and entering full-on David Icke mode - from the Daily Express online:

Chemtrails 'will wipe out humans' causing biblical-style floods, says expert

Granted, this latter is in the Express's "weird" section, but it's still - technically - a newspaper and you still have to read all the way to the bottom to get a quote from someone who says it's nonsense. The wild-eyed nutjob is called an "expert" in the headline, "an environmental expert" in the text, and further unnamed "experts" are cited as claiming that "evidence" for this incredible horseshit is "growing".

The problem is that clickbait sells. In an era where newspapers are haemorrhaging money, they're desperate for eyeballs on their web pages and turn to screaming nonsense - often highly partisan nonsense - in order to get them. I was going to include a link to the Express article, but that's just encouraging them. If anyone really wants to read the piece, google it - but I can save you the effort with this executive summary:

Shrieking headline! Doom, disaster and despair!
Horseshit expert horseshit, horseshit horseshit horseshit.
[photograph of vapour trails, captioned with panicky - and horseshit - question, to which the answer is "No".]
Expert horseshit horseshit expert horseshit.
[photo of man in hat]
Horseshit horseshit horseshit horseshit.
[wholly inapposite photograph of a volcano]
Horseshit horseshit.
(it's not true)

[Smivs]

<chuckles>
If only all reporting was that erudite!