jamezpolley.com

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!