Alex Barnett other blog

Hey, a new game in town? I've got 3. How many can you...?

"If newspapers and blogs can be manipulated, where does this stop... Blogging needs its own Kabbalah Red String bracelet me thinks... maybe to be different it could be on the ankle... unisex that is.."

Ben Barren is of course referring to the Memeorandum Hacked thing. It started innocently enough with well known troublemaker Tara Hunt:

"Alex and I discussed, at length, strategy on getting our posts to rise to the top of Memeorandum."

Barnett, the baffoon that he is, then proceed to litter the blagosphere with spurious tagcrap:

"For no particular reason other than Tara did so, I recommend adding the suprcilious tag. I'm adding another: self-referential. Sorry, no screencast today (although if it works, you never know)."

Little did he know of the memeorandumhacked tag. Had he known, he might not of used this questionable fulcksonomy nomenclature.

The results so far? Here are the pics on Flickr of the Memeorandum Hacked evidence:

In case you are wondering, I do realise this is all very silly and I hope we don't get 'banned' in the future.

So I say in all seriousness - we should see the constructive side of this: that the algorithms can be easily hacked and than sooner or later the spammers will try this on themselves. So it might as well be us that tests the system before they spoil it all for us.

Are you worried about Bird Flu, that we're all going to die?  Worry no more! The solution is here!

According to a news report I was watching on NWNC, you can avoid the Bird Flu by washing your hands for twenty seconds at time. It didn't say how many times, just each time you do, just do it for twenty seconds.

The report suggested that you sing Happy Birthday, twice, so you can get the timing right.

Two thoughts.

Couldn't they have suggested a song more along the lines of the bird theme? How about 'Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken'?

It goes:

Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken,
Lay a little egg for me.
Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken,
I want one for my tea.
I haven't had an egg since Easter,
And now it's half past three.
So, chick, chick, chick, chicken,
Lay a little egg for me.

(by Unknown, although reading through the lyrics, it was probably invented by a bored chicken farmer who had mad cow's disease)

Anyway there must be other bird songs to choose from that last ten seconds (or twenty for that matter, why sing the song twice?).  Jeez.

Which brings me to my second point.

Did some actually measure the length of the Happy Birthday song in seconds? Did any kind of validation actually go on?

By my watch it took thirteen seconds to sing.  That means it would take twenty-six seconds each time you washed your hands, not twenty.

That's six seconds over the government-recommended time. Now that might sound trivial to you...but over the period of a week that can add up to a lot of redundant time of your life singing Happy Birthday for no benefit whatsoever.  In fact, assuming you go to the loo 10 times and eat three times a day and wash your hands at least once for each of those events, that's a minute and 28 seconds a day, or around 9 minutes a week, or 8 hours in a year.

Further, assuming that there is a working population in the Untied States of 167,465,300, this government-caused apparent joviality wastes a non-poultry 1,324,371,414 hours of people singing Happy Birthday needlessly in one year or 167,465,300 working days lost to a ditty.

That is 458,809 years, my feathered friends lost to a song. Or to put it a way that even Greenspan might take note, $16,662,107,644 will be lost to the US economy in a single year, hardly a trivial matter.

So don't bother.