nocto

the world’s biggest liar contest is taking place today. i wonder how they judge that? i don’t lie. never. honest. well:

you’re as honest as the next person (who may not be 100% honest 100% of the time).

that’ll do me.

the people who make blogger have created pyrads. billed as “web advertising that doesn’t suck” it’s a micro advertising management system. this is the type of text ad being used successfully at google and metafilter. what’s good about pyrads is that it looks as if it’s going to be an extensible system usable by other sites.

i disagree that all other web advertising sucks, i think it’s a matter of targeting the right people. we get exceedingly good click through rates at loquax by showing adverts to people who are interested in their content. we do however see a much better response to adverts in text form than to graphic adverts. i think that, on the whole, people just tend to ignore most graphics on the web.

one of the really good things about these new micro systems is that they allow small sites to carry out small campaigns with minimal effort. the only thing that concerns me is that there isn’t yet the ability to target ads. the google system is successful mainly because it shows you adverts that you want to see and not just because those ads are small and unobtrusive.

phones4u are offering jobs to 14 and 15 year olds to sell hand held computers. they’re offering low wages but luring these new employees with tales of future riches. whilst i think these future riches are likely to be utterly bogus for the majority of their new recruits i disagree with the teaching unions that the company is being irresponsible by employing people this young.

personally i think that there’s a lot to be said for combining school and work and that teachers ought to examine their claims that studying for gcse exams means that their students shouldn’t have time for anything else in their life. i think the laws on employing young people are reasonable enough and phones4u are working within those laws and there shouldn’t be a problem.

i’m going to lapse into one of those “in my day” bits now, feel free to switch off… i was 14 in 1986 and got paid £7 a week for delivering papers for at least 2 hours every morning. that’s less than 50p an hour. i didn’t enjoy it much and graduated to a £1.05 an hour saturday job in the local bookshop at the earliest opportunity. that level of work, which was widespread amongst my peers, didn’t cause teaching unions to get up in arms so why does the much cushier phones4u offer cause them to do so?

i think the attitude that needs examining is:

they could think this is an alternative career route. we know it’s not. we know that they should be concentrating on their education at this age and responsible employers know that also.

education is a lifelong thing. it’s not something you squeeze in before 16/18/21 and then spend the rest of your life trying to forget. it’s not something you can’t get later if you’re more interested in other things when you’re under those ages. it’s not something only found in school lessons.

i know my viewpoints coloured by the fact that i’m a very independent person and earning money myself was an important thing for me to do as a teenager. i was a teenager who wanted to be at school, to go to university, to learn about everything. but narrow minded attitudes that you can only learn at school and if you miss the boat it’s gone forever miss the fact that there’s a lot more to life than studying for exams and that learning to sell computers could well be more beneficial for many people than getting their gcse grades.

fun things to do with your book database. presuming you’re dumb enough to keep one that is. i’ve produced a page of the books that i have yet to read. 72 of them at the current count.

this is completely useless to me really because the majority of them are just sitting on my bedroom windowsill waiting to be read. for the most part it’s easier to look at the windowsill than it is to look at the webpage. all it does really is prove that the longer a book’s been on the to be read mountain the longer it’s likely to stay there.

most of those long unread books aren’t books that i think are bad, just books that haven’t looked interesting enough to pick up to read but that looked interesting enough to pick up in a bookshop somewhere. a lot of them are used books. books i splash out good money on are likely to get read a lot sooner than ragged 50p paperbacks.

mainly what strikes me is that i feel these books are entirely unrepresentative of what i actually read. there’s a problem to be addressed here somewhere.

it seems bbc2 are replacing all their channel identity animations with new ones. the new ones look like fun but i’ll miss the old ones even though i barely watch any tv. these animations are quite one of the best things on tv. that probably explains why i hardly watch any. “paint pot” is far and away my favourite one and i know people who took years to work out that in the original “paint” version the paint fell so perfectly horizontally because it was filmed on it’s side. [found via metafilter]

doshtracker allows you to log the serial numbers and condition of the bank notes you have in your pocket. hopefully at some point in the future other users will get hold of your notes and log them again and you’ll be able to see where they’ve got to. the what’s the point? page doesn’t really explain what the point is. it’s just fun really and a uk equivalent to where’s george?. doshtracker currently has just over £60k worth of notes entered into its database. where’s george has nearly $80 million. as kevan points out, we’d all be up in arms if the government was doing this. [found via as above]

a future chapter to a “how much of a geek are you?” test should ask you to read the true history of the net and identify brian, dennis, bill, tim, marc, larry, randal, scott, steve, steve, tom and linus before you get to the glossary. in fact you should be able to get them all without even visiting the page to be a real geek. i got 10/12 as i didn’t know randal and tom. [found via /usr/bin/girl/]

i wonder if, in alabama, they put stickers on religious studies textbooks warning children that the existence of any kind of higher being is a controversial theory. i wonder if the physics textbooks tell children that the existence of black holes or subatomic particles are only theories that scientists make up to explain the evidence we can see. i wonder if the history textbooks explain that everything we know about what’s happened in the past is based on hearsay. i wonder if the maths textbooks start with basic axioms and derive everything else from them.

i hope they teach their school pupils that the ability to weigh up the evidence and decide for themselves is one of the most important things that they can learn and that teachers, and school boards, are not always correct. teaching children to question what’s written in their textbooks is a good thing. however the way the alabama school board picks out one topic to question above all others not only makes it look stupid but also makes it look as if it accepts the rest of its syllabus as fact.

they do it with mirrors.

if you spin around quickly, you experience what the designers call “elastic time”: The mirror slows down your image so you can view yourself from the back.

actually they do it with hidden cameras and screens that masquerade as mirrors but that wouldn’t make such a snappy agatha christie title. [found via harrumph!]

for no good reason i found myself singing the lullaby rock a bye baby:

rock a bye baby
on the tree top
when the wind blows
the cradle will rock

so far so good. we’ve put the baby up a tree, but that’s not so bad…

when the bow breaks
the cradle will fall
down will come cradle
baby and all

er, that’s a nice way to send your children to sleep: go to sleep now or you’ll get dropped on your head!

i’m trying to think of a nursery rhyme that doesn’t involve violence. jack and jill ends with jack cracking his head open. humpty dumpty is so broken that he can’t be put together again. three mice who were already visually impaired had their tails cut off by the farmer’s wife. the old woman who lived in a shoe whipped all her children and sent them to bed without any tea. ring a ring a roses seems quite nice until you learn that all that sneezing and falling down is about dying from the plague.

and they say kids today get too much violence from tv…