zhasper2.0

I’ve noticed a trend where a lot of feeds are includ­ing large blocky ads at the bot­tom of each feed item. I can live with that; a little ugly, but I can skip them easily.

Today I saw some­thing new:

That’s right: two com­plete posts con­sist­ing of noth­ing more than the same ad.

Scrolling down shows me that the very next item is exactly the same add from “The Fail Blog”, another site oper­ated by the same company.

Ads with con­tent I can stand. Ads without con­tent?  *unsubscribe*

I was in the super­mar­ket get­ting some laun­dry powder last night and noticed some­thing really strange: every single brand of con­cen­trated laun­dry powder was advert­ising on their pack­aging the fact that they’re about to be relaunched in a new ver­sion. The new powders are all going to be 2x as con­cen­trated, and most brands made a big deal out of the fact that the new pack­aging will there­fore be half the size.

Golly. Every brand? All at once? All decid­ing to redo their for­mu­la­tion, redo their pack­aging, and retool their man­u­fac­tur­ing plants, all with identical changes to for­mu­la­tion and pack­aging, all at the same time? Unpossible!

You’d almost think that every brand of powder was actu­ally exactly the same, made at the same plant, and just pack­aged slightly dif­fer­ently. But that would surely never happen!

At first glance, I assumed that this was related to the hor­rible fires in Vic­toria. Nope, just advert­ising. Well done SMH!

Stilgher­rian takes weekly nom­in­a­tions for “Cnut of the Week”. Tra­di­tion­ally the gong goes to Stephen Con­roy, for his increas­ingly futile attempts to hold back the (largely ima­gin­ary) tide of pae­do­philes sweep­ing over the internet.

Unfor­tu­nately I believe this week’s spot has already been claimed. How­ever, I’d like to make an early nom­in­a­tion for next week.

Steve Turner, assist­ant sec­ret­ary of the Pub­lic Ser­vice Asso­ci­ation of NSW, said … the blame did not lie solely with the Gov­ern­ment as “any com­puter sys­tem can be hacked … even Amer­ican defence force computers”.

[update 12/2/2009] Nope, there hadn’t been a Stilgher­rian Live for a while. There is now though, so con­sider this a nomination[/update]

You know you’re read­ing a web­site tar­geted at Amer­ic­ans when you see phrases like this:

Fire­fox is par­tic­u­larly strong in Europe, the area over which the EU has oversight.

Fire­men here to put out the oven fire http://skitch.com/jdumay/97em/kitchenonfire. about 1 hour ago from twit­ter­rific

From the nor­mally staid ABC news web­site comes this gem:

Para­noia is much more com­mon in mod­ern soci­ety than pre­vi­ously thought, says a Brit­ish doc­tor, who warns it could lead to major prob­lems in society.

Oh noes! Rampant para­noia! Is this what’s been mak­ing me think crazy thoughts lately? Our soci­ety is in danger! Quick people: we must be vigil­ant! Exam­ine your own thoughts for any hint of para­noia, NOW!

Dr Daniel Free­man from the psy­chi­atry insti­tute of King’s Col­lege Lon­don says almost a quarter of the pop­u­la­tion exper­i­ence reg­u­lar para­noid thoughts,

One in four? Then it’s almost cer­tain that I’m para­noid. Woe is me! Whatever could be caus­ing this epi­demic of paranoia?

driven by an ava­lanche of sen­sa­tional stor­ies in the media.

Oh. Right. Good to see that you’re help­ing there, doc!

A few days ago, a colleage poin­ted met at Air­Ser­vices Australia’s new fancy flight tracker, which allows you to watch planes com­ing and going in the air­space around Sydney air­port. There are plenty of things not to like — MS Vir­tual Earth , the nasty click-through EULA that you have to agree to before you even find out what the site provides…

But, that aside, it’s fairly cool. Planes, fly­ing, around Sydney! Res­ults from noise-level meters, so you can see just how noisy your new sub­urb is going to be. Even details about the planes — type of plane, alti­tude, flight numbers..

So today there was a tra­gic acci­dent involving two planes with trainee pilots. SMH have a video online which shows the flight tracker, and shows the two planes involved col­lid­ing (and then one of them drop­ping off the radar — lit­er­ally). Accord­ing to the timestamps super­im­posed on the video, the crash hap­pens just after 11:23am

The site lets you see his­tor­ical data: in the box on the lower-left, un-tick the “Show Cur­rent Flights” but­ton, then use the con­trols to choose the day and time you’d like to look at. So it’s easy enough to go back to 11:20am and run through the next few minutes and see the crash for yourself.

Except… that it’s not. There are no planes in that area at that time. In fact, there’s no light avi­ation at all. Someone has excised all light avi­ation records between 11:00am and 11:59:16am. If you set the timer to start art 10:59, you see a whole bunch of planes:

sud­denly dissapear:

It’s not a subtle removal either, even if you ignore all the planes which freeze and then van­ish from the graph. There’s a nice graph show­ing you the num­ber of move­ments per hour for the day — spot what’s odd about today:

I fail to under­stand this. I… just fail. I really don’t under­stand why this is con­sidered sens­it­ive, and why it’s been removed.

It seems that as well as fir­ing all their journ­al­ists, SMH have for­got­ten how to do math.

Well done!