The Bizarreness as it goes down.
To quote Jon Gruber: “The intersection of horrifying and wonderful.” This is a massively high resolution image of an ant that you can zoom in on to an extraordinary degree—positively awe-inspiring.
In Jalalabad, Afghanistan there is a unique little tiki bar called the Taj (apparently the only bar for hundreds of miles) that has hit on a unique proposition for creating “social media software.” Since the bar is the only one around, there is a unique mixture of individuals, from military personnel to consultants for NGOs to mercenaries.1 Any of the patrons are made the offer that if they will deposit some information that they have (photos, white papers, GPS coordinates) on the bar’s terrabyte server, they can have a free beer, as well as download any information they want from the server. I’d call it a beernet!
You can hear more about it at length in this video interview of Smari McCarthy by Vinay Gupta.
[via the Humanitarian Technology Network]
Mos Eisley ring a bell? ↩
This article over at Scatterbox (dutifully maintained by Steven Silvers) really caught my ire. Apparently two moronic employees at Domino’s utilized 21st century technology to illustrate to the world what total disregard they have for the customers of Domino’s, sticking ingredients in their noses and spitting in sandwiches, all on video tape and all on Youtube. Of course, this caused no end of trouble for Domino’s and got the suits asking themselves, “Oh crap! What do we do when our employees can use social media tools to cluster bomb our brand?” The normal reaction is likely to put a corporate policy into zzzzz… Sorry, ever since getting out of the rat race, I can’t finish sentences with “corporate policy” in them any more. And it doesn’t matter, because what they’re going to do is precisely the wrong thing to do.
As I mentioned in my recent note on memes, the phenomena make good use of twitter. And with a new tool called Twist you can see mentions of words quantitatively, illustrating trends that are possibly occurring. The obvious one for today has been the mention of “Michael Jackson” or “MJ” which at the peak of the discussion of the news was actually trending at 26% of all messages on twitter.1 It turns out that the King of Pop reigns supreme even after his demise. However, I spotted a sillier trend in investigating Twist as a tool. Being in possession of the mind I have and maybe because it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to see how the word “penis” fares on Twitter. It turns out that the word is fairly consistently used in roughly .03% of Twitter messages. But then I wondered, why the spike on June 24 at 11:30pm EST? For a brief time, the usage of the word penis spiked to practically double its normal mean at .07% of messages. Why the blip? I looked into some of the messages that were being posted and noticed that it was likely the fault of Jon Stewart. The Daily Show—a satirical show about current events2—airs at 11:00pm EST. During that particular Wednesday episode, discussing events surrounding SC governor Mark Sanford, said “…another conservative politician with a liberal penis.” Voilá! Instant memeburst.
I’d been dreading making this support call. It was one of these things where a company gave me credit card protection for six free months and then they were going to start charging for the service ($1.35 / $100 in credit / month to be exact—exorbitant to say the least!). I didn’t want to make the call to tell them to stop the service because you always encounter like the last bastion of “but wait, but wait, but wait” and you just have to keep repeating yourself: “No. Do not want.” It’s annoying. Anyway, they always ask you for the reason why you don’t want to continue the service and I thought, You know, I’m going to give them a reason that they just can’t be ready for. If you use a reason that they’re ready for, they’ll keep you on the phone that much longer trying to find a deal in their script or database that will keep you around.
“It’s too expensive.”
“But sir, did you know we will never charge you more than bla bla bla…”
I had some actuary tables from a project I worked on a while back and I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and I figured that the probability of me losing my job or getting injured or the probability of my death is currently at about 3.645%[^1] I called and I waited and the operator came on and after the initial exchange the inevitable question occurred “Would you like to tell us why you are canceling the service?”
Yeah, I’ll tell you why.
