There was a time when the most ridiculous headlines were to be found in the Sunday Sport: Killer Plant Stalks Queen Mum, Aliens Turned Our Son Into An Olive, London Bus Found On Moon, London Bus Disappears From Moon, and so on.
Today, you can find such headlines everywhere. See if you can spot the real headline amongst the set below:
Man killed wife in Facebook row
Legal case against God dismissed
Killer chef cooked dead boyfriend
Iran makes huge ostrich sandwich
What can I say?
Stephen Lewis, while commenting on a recent post of mine, referred in passing to Fowler. Henry Watson Fowler. Here are my two favourite excerpts from Modern English Usage:
I have written about them before, but that was before Google Books; I couldn’t resist embedding the original text in a rewrite, and in the expectation that many of you weren’t regular readers when I last wrote about Fowler.
Yes, it’s about cricket. I noticed that the current Indian team has made 109 Test centuries between them. Last time around, in the first Test versus Australia, the inclusion of Kumble drove that number up to 110. [Oddly enough, Kumble has scored the same number of Test centuries as Dhoni!]
Now that’s a big number, it isn’t often that a team boasts a century of centuries. To put it in context, the current Australian team’s comparative number is 86. I went and looked at the team under Steve Waugh, at a time when it boasted Justin Langer, Mark Waugh, Matthew Hayden, Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Damien Martyn. When I look at the lifetime totals for that group (which also included Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath) the number exceeds 170. But when I try and find the highest total as an actual team in an actual Test, the best I can do is 91, in October 2002, versus Pakistan in Sharjah. I think that’s the biggest, the others just didn’t score centuries quickly enough to afford the exits of the Waugh brothers.
Very unscientific, very anecdotal. But the number to beat is 110. As in the total number of Test centuries scored by a Test team as constituted in a real Test and only including efforts up to and including that Test.
Any offers? Enjoy your weekend trying to get to a Nelson or beyond.
An aside. Imagine what you would need from Cricinfo in terms of database access or web service or RSS feed, such that you could write a program that could work out the answer. Let me know your thoughts.
There’s been a lot of kerfuffle about “journalism”, both in the press as well as in the blogosphere, over the past few years; much of it has been focused on some sort of polarised debate, suggesting there are two camps, one called mainstream media (MSM) and one called citizen media (CM).
This is a flawed view, one that I’ve written about before here, here, and here. We have to avoid the temptation to make every issue a Blefuscudian one, pitching Big-Endians against Little-Endians. [An aside: I decided to take a look at Wikia for this definition; it still lags behind the Wikipedia definition, but I shall be tracking the differences more carefully from now.]
It doesn’t matter what kind of journalist you are, MSM or CM; these labels relate to methods and rules rather than professional core aspects. MSM people tend to follow a centralised rather than P2P editorial approach, while CM guys tend to be more independent; MSM people tend to use more traditional techniques to gather and publish news, as it were.
Even these statements are too simplistic, too generalised. The lines between MSM and CM are blurring, there are people who work in both “camps”, the tools and techniques are crossing over more and more.
One thing has not changed, and will not change. The job of an editor. MSM or CM, it doesn’t matter. Which is why it gives me great pleasure to link online to a Guardian article covering a Sunday Express story, headlined Furious email from senior staff member to Sunday Express editiorial department.
I implore you to read it. You won’t regret it. But perhaps you should put that cup of hot beverage down before you read it. Just for safety’s sake, and to protect your clothes.
[Thanks to Anant for the tip-off].
Take a complex adaptive system. Introduce network effects. Introduce artificial scarcity. Prepare for meltdown.
It’s one way of describing what happened during the New York Blackout. As the grid itself, along with the system for managing it, grew like Topsy, it became harder to see the wood for the trees, harder to make abundant resources look scarce, harder to protect against simple exogenous events.
It may be one way of describing the reasons for the current credit crunch. Capital markets are complex adaptive systems. For embedded leverage read network effects. For illiquidity read artificial scarcity, which, when combined with embedded leverage, increases opacity. It then gets hard, very hard, to protect against simple exogenous events. Might as well fart against thunder.
Enterprise architectures are already complex enough, a legacy of the proprietary architectures and walled gardens of vendor-dominated worlds; network effects are also much in evidence, as the number of connected people, devices and associated services increases exponentially. Adding artificial scarcity to this potent mixture is not advisable, it gets harder to protect against simple exogenous events.
DRM is artificial scarcity. Nothing more, nothing less. In general, all poorly thought out security policies are nothing more than attempts at implementing artificial scarcity.
For every artificial scarcity, there will be at least one equal and opposite artificial abundance. And that artificial abundance may be the exogenous event that tips the whole fragile environment into fibrillation.
Complex adaptive systems can be regulated, but not by head-in-sand post-facto regulation approaches. There’s a lot we could have learnt from the antivirus experience, a lot we can still learn. Unless, of course, we want history to repeat itself. Which we seem to be willing to do in capital markets, whatever’s left of them.
Poorly implemented firewalls and even more poorly implemented security policies to do with identity, authentication and permission already blight the landscape of enterprises. Consider very carefully the effects of adding path pollutants like DRM to such a toxin-laden environment.
[This post is heavily influenced by numerous conversations I’ve had over the years with Sean Park, Malcolm Dick and Michael Power.]