James is writing about Facebook. Again.
April 2nd, 2008 at 18:57

One of my favourite things about Facebook consuming all of our lives is the news feed. Especially the status updates. If you’re over the age of 30, a Facebook status is basically a one line description of what someone is doing at any given time.

Usually, everyone sets them to something trivial or banal - I could probably tell you with some accuracy what some of my friends have been eating lately, and sometimes they’re used for actually useful information, such as explaining where someone is. I try to make mine pithy and whimsical.

My favourite type of Facebook status though is what I’d term dramatic ambiguity. If you’re a regular Facebook user, you must know what I mean - when you read something like “James is annoyed with certain people” or “James wishes someone would stop being a twat” - when they’re used as the 21st century equivalent of bitching about someone behind their back.

I love it when this happens because it lets you wonder and speculate on what the actual gossip is.

“[Facebook friend] wants to tell certain people where to certainly go, but can’t for the sake of diplomacy.” is a pretty obvious cry for attention - what could be going on?! Oh, the possibilities!

The other great thing about the Facebook news feed is that you get to follow all sorts of events in real time. Its always entertaining to see someone go from “in a relationship” to “single”, then to “its complicated”, then “in a relationship” again… and then a week later back to “single” permanently. Its as if Facebook is charting our own personal time lines live.

When I’m out and about doing the sort of things you’d expect a young go-getter like myself to do, I update my status fairly regularly by text message. I like to think that there’s one of my hundred or so friends sitting on their computer following my movements obsessively, like some weird stalker fan. I suppose its probably a good thing that Mark Chapman didn’t have Facebook.

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Holy Statistics, Batman! When regular blogging topics collide!
December 8th, 2007 at 16:59

I noticed something peculiar earlier - Facebook network pages have lots of statistics about the people in the network - percentage male and female, a breakdown of political leanings, that sort of the thing, but there is one obvious statistical breakdown they’ve missed though, which strikes me as odd considering they collect the data in a regimented, easily counted way: religion.

I find it slightly perplexing that at a glance I can discover that 8% of my university colleagues define themselves as liberal, and 3% of them are married, but not find out which strand of bullshit most of them believe. I’m actually tempted to play the “political correctness gone mad” card.

So given that I love facebook, pie charts and slagging off religion, I took it upon myself to generate the statistics myself. As I am a man of science, I don’t want to create the impression that this pie-chart is at all accurate, fair, or representative. There’s the usual caveats of this is only made up of the 1126 people who are less feckless than the 5359 other people at my university who have neglected to enter a religion in the religion box on their profile.

This basically means that the people (women) who have it listed that they’re “spiritual” because they occasionally buy scented candles don’t count. Likewise entries like “none” and misspellings haven’t been counted because I’m not willing to count this manually. The benefit of this though is that the people who do count have clearly at least thought about their religious position enough to fill it in with something coherent, so they can probably explain their beliefs (but probably not justify them in the case of the theists… zing).

As you’d expect, the big religions - Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have the largest market share of the theists, with 38%, 14%, and 18% respectively. Excellently though, it appears that there are lots of Atheists and Agnostics (and Pastafarians) - about 29% of people are going to be predisposed towards acting rationally in all situations. This probably isn’t surprising unless like me, you spend your free time on YouTube getting annoyed at creationist videos, though.

What I find slightly surprising is that considering there’s five Jews, which is a sort of proper religion, there’s 5 “Wiccan” people. Or to give them their proper name “attention seekers who used to be goths when they were teenagers”. Similarly, there’s four “pagan” people, which is slightly bewildering, as they can’t even use the theist, cough, “reasoning”, cough, that loads of people believe what they believe, “so it must be true”.

So there you have it - a breakdown of the religions at my university, as derived from some unreliable statistics.

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Picking on people who share names with bastards
November 19th, 2007 at 16:56

I’ve invented a new game. Its called “How many people on Facebook share a name with someone I don’t like?”. I’ve been trying to think of a snappier title, but the best I can come up with has to be read in a Scottish accent: “Guess who many?“.

It turns out that there’s loads of unfortunate people in the world. Here’s a top-13 list of some unlucky people cursed with sharing a name with some truly dreadful people:

1. Nick Griffin - 274
2. David Cameron - 252
3. James Blunt - 171
4. David Mellor - 47
5. Jeffrey Archer - 37
6. Maxine Carr - 12
7. Richard Blackwood - 12
8. Richard Littlejohn - 8
9. Ian Huntley - 5
10. Vernon Kay - 3
11. Lowri Turner - 2
12. Madeleine McCann - 1
13. Adolf Hitler - 0

There are 171 James Blunts in the world. I especially feel sorry for the ugly ones, who have the joke set up for them by their namesake. At least no one named their kids Adolf Hitler, I guess.

I feel sorry for the Madeleine McCann on there - every day she must glance at the Daily Express front page on the way to work, only to learn that she’s either alive, dead, or whether or not her parents killed her, depending on the editorial slant the paper are taking that day. And every time her location is questioned, it must sound like some sort of sick joke, rather than a genuine enquiry. I hope she’s not planning any trips to Portugal otherwise we could be in for a year of the press saying “Maddy has been found” and then speculation on how she’s managed to age by 20 years.

And the poor other Richard Littlejohns - if they Google for their own name, as people (er, I) sometimes do, they might inadvertently think that I hate them.

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Eggheads and Morris Dancers
September 6th, 2007 at 18:58

I know I’ve written about Eggheads before, but today’s episode had such an incredible opening that I have to share it with you. As every episode of the quiz begins, the team introduced themselves. Today’s team were a bunch of Morris Dancers. They introduced themselves and their jobs something like:

“Hello, I’m a chartered surveyor”

“Hi, I’m a data analyst”

“Hello, I’m a supply-chain distribution manager”

That sort of thing. Some of them had moustaches, some had beards. Basically they all looked like dull, mediocre people. It turned out that the name of the team was Berkshire Bedlam Morris. Host Dermot Murnghan asked why the “Bedlam” in the name.

“Well”, one of the contestants explained, “Bedlam is an old word for mad house or crazy person… which I think describes this lot!” (paraphrasing).

I actually visibly flinched, involuntarily turning my head away from the TV and putting my hands over my ears on hearing this. There’s only one thing worse than when terminally boring people claim that they’re “mad” or “crazy”, and that’s accusing someone of being mad when they are actually mentally ill.

I actually located their Morris Dancing website to try and determine whether they are a crazy and wacky bunch or not. And I’ve come to the conclusion that whilst not as boring as I originally thought they were, I think they’re closer to being actually mentally ill than being wacky crazy guys. Either way it makes Bedlam a more accurate name than I gave them credit for.

They seem to go into town dressed as extraordinarily camp Power Rangers.

It would appear they have quite an expansive repertoire, but as you might have guessed, I’m no Morris Dancing expert. I wouldn’t know a jig from a heel & toe dance. I can’t quite tell if the descriptions on the page are written in a knowingly funny way or not.

And after delving further into their website, there’s some genuinely weird stuff. There’s photos of them dressed as women, cockneys, australians, angels, next to nothing, and, er, dressed as women again. To be honest, them in their normal Morris Dancing attire is bizarre enough.

So it looks like Morris Dancers are slightly livelier than I gave them credit for. But are they merely annoyingly deliberately trying to be wacky, or are they actual proper nutters? You decide.

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Peter Florida Backlash
August 12th, 2007 at 15:40

There’s one sure-fire way to provoke a response on the internet: arguing about religion. It turns out that Peter Florida’s trip the Natural History Museum has provoked some interesting responses. I imagine this is something to do with him, er, posting it on GodTube. Yeah, that GodTube. He’s not very original, that Peter Florida, whoever he is.

After being on GodTube about 24 hours at the time of writing, there’s been six comments. Most of them appear to be from fellow jokers like myself - which made me wonder whether there’s any real Christians on there at all. I did get this one utterly terrifying comment though, from someone who had seen in the video that Peter Florida had claimed that you only get volcanoes and earthquakes in the non-Christian world:

“I dont think that God put Volcanoes in the “non-Christian” world to destroy them. God doesnt hate people, He hates the sin they commit. China now has the fastest growing Christian Church in the world. Plus I know that there are many Christian people in Central America. Guatemala, costa Rica, El salvador, etc. More than here in the US. So if that were the case he would destroy all the US because they alloy abortion and Central America doesn’t. GOd died for the ^@!s, muslims, women and aetheists too. We just need to bring the gospel to them so they can change their ways.” (kgalicia05, 2007)

Aside from the fact that they seem to self-censor the word “gay” in the style of a comic-book, they seem to have taken Peter Florida’s other assertions just as seriously in order to not spot the sarcasm. This includes Peter claiming that a dead Tiger is breaking the second law of thermodynamics, and asserting that the moon is half way between the sun and the earth.

Peter’s also received a private message on GodTube. Yeah, I thought they’d all communicate via prayer using God as a central node and receiving messages through obscure signs (like seeing it miraculously appear burned into toast, that sort of thing), but still. It reads:

“Okay dude.. if you think science is hogwash.. When you contract some form of really really bad disease.. don’t turn to science to help you. In fact.. don’t take any medicines when you get a cold or flu, because God will help you. Don’t use your computer, use your video camera, drive your car, use electricity. You don’t seem to like science, except for when its convenient for you, and where it fits your needs.”

Christian, atheist or otherwise… they appear to have missed what I was getting at. I thought that a scruffy British student with a mouth like a gutter would give it away if the bullshit reasoning didn’t, but clearly I over-estimated the internet. Apparently this isn’t a new phenomenon either, and it is in fact well documented. It appears that I have inadvertently demonstrated Poe’s Law:

“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.”

Christians, eh?

Update (23:33): It looks like I’ve been rumbled (again). After receiving a Google Blog Search hit for “GodTube”, my video has been taken down. It looks like the moderators stay proactive looking for fake videos put up there by jokers. If you go the video now it claims the video hasn’t been approved by moderators… implying it got through the pre-moderation first time around. Scary.

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New Layout!
July 23rd, 2007 at 02:23

Notice anything different? I got tired of looking like everyone else, so I’ve updated my blog’s layout.

If you’re reading via RSS, now would be a good time to click in to see what I’m talking about.

There’s no major changes besides what you can see - they’re entirely superficial. I’ve basically bolted on a Batmobile-style fin, put some neons underneath and added some of those hubcaps that make it look like the wheels are still spinning when the car is stationary. Underneath all of the plastic tat its still a Fiat Punto inside.

I’ve arranged everything into neat boxes to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive ordering desires. I’ve also boosted up the font-size of posts - although this is mainly for selfish reasons. I run a 19″ monitor at 1280×1024 that’s set quite far back on my desk, so it makes easier for me to see. I quite like the bigger font as it makes me feel more important. Like I’m shouting my opinions at you and you’re being forced to listen.

What do you think? Why not post a comment and tell me - that would also be useful to check whether comments are still working. If anything isn’t, drop me an e-mail on the address above.

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Political Metrics
July 22nd, 2007 at 01:20

Politicians have always had a problem attracting young people. If you’re a boring old fart who’s idea of an exciting evening is discussing the finer points of the Private Finance Initiative or the latest movements in the Hungarian interest rate, then young people are going to think that you’re the most irritatingly tedious person alive. Its why politicians go out of their way to explain why they love the Arctic Monkeys.

But how can we judge a politician’s popularity with the ‘yoof’ of today? I think my friend Michael and I have stumbled upon an exciting new way to take metrics on just how popular politicians are: Facebook groups.

(Readers! If you have a Facebook account, it will massively enhance the rest of this post - it’s like having digital telly and press red. You’re able to pointlessly switch over from Tim Henman losing at Wimbledon to a couple of nobodies on Court 4 battling it out.)

On Facebook, you have the ability to create and join groups where you can discuss common interests or state your allegiance with a cause. Whilst this is invariably sickeningly studenty topics like “Fun House Appreciation Society” or “Bring back the Crystal Maze” (if that were a manifesto commitment the party would be practically guaranteed victory), there are some political groups too. And I think the groups say a lot about politicians. Here are some examples:

Lets start with someone obvious: the Boris Johnson appreciation society has over 12,000 members.

‘Stop David Cameron… his lies make baby Jesus cry‘ has 1200 members. Meanwhile, he has 62 members in his ‘appreciation society‘, although to be fair, there are a number of pro-Cameron groups so the membership is probably fairly fragmented.

One of the more bewildering groups is the (brace yourself for this) David Davis Appreciation Society. W..W…What? David Davis. Really. It has 40 members.

Tessa Jowell has exactly seven fans. Charles Clarke has an incredible ten.

The group “Iain Duncan Smith, I love you“, generously calls IDS “only slightly inept”. The man who thinks that tax cuts will heal deep personal problems and cause less marriages to fall apart has only three fans. This is pretty pathetic when you consider that Alistair Darling’s eyebrows alone have exactly 24 times as many supporters.

‘Michael Meacher‘ for PM. Two members. One of them is… Michael Meacher.

‘Hazel Blears depreciation society‘… 151 members. ‘Hazel Blears - what a fox‘… 20 members. Telling.

There are 3,500 nutcases who ‘appreciate’ Margaret Thatcher. The Anti-Thatcher league only has 640 members. Damn.
‘Ruth Kelly is shit and should resign‘ - 16 members. ‘Sack Ruth Kelly‘ - 21 members. ‘I support Ruth Kelly‘ - er, 2 members.

George Osbourne has 102 fans and 94 anti-fans. Which shows that there is something slightly wrong with the world.

So what does this prove? Some people like politicians and other people don’t. What a revelation.

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Other James O’Malleys
July 17th, 2007 at 18:37

Here’s an idea for a blog meme that I’m surprised I haven’t seen before: blogging about people with the same name as you! It turns out that there are a few people on the internet who share my excellent name, so I thought I’d write about them, to try and judge whether they’re as cool as I am:

1) James O’Malley

This James O’Malley appears to be the most famous of us. He appears to be some sort of American folk musician. The front page of his website claims that “His sweet voice and gentle finger style on the guitar enthralls the most jaded listener” - I’d like to think that this sentiment applies to James O’Malleys in general, and not just this one individual. I had a listen to some of his MP3s and for a genre I’m indifferent to it was tolerable stuff - one of his songs sounded like the background music from the Lon Lon Ranch in Ocarina of Time.

2) James O’Malley

James O’Malley, PHD is proof that the name is a sign of intelligence. He’s an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. They call him Doctor O’Malley. Like other James O’Malley’s, ‘the doc’, as we call him to differentiate him, concentrates on important work: according to his bio, he is “developing likelihood-based methods for estimation of multilevel covariance structures” - coincidentally, I am also in the process of conducing some research in this field. I am researching the meaning of the word “covariance”.

“Dr. O’Malley received his BSc (honors) and PhD degrees in statistics from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He then spent the last two years of his PhD at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he simultaneously earned an MS in applied statistics.” - that’s two post-graduate degrees earned simultaneously. Christ(church) on a bike.

3) James O’Malley

This James O’Malley is an artist. A proper artist too. Judging by his photo, he’s rich and has a big house. Excellent.

4) James O’Malley

This one scares me a little bit - he’s trying to muscle in on my territory. He’s got his own blog, he’s a student and calls himself a journalist. He even gives me a mention. The interesting thing about looking at the page of James O’Malleys is that we all appear to be quite lazy - preferring to lean against things to prop ourselves up rather than stand under our own weight.

5) James O’Malley

This last one is some sort of graphic designer. Looking at his CV, it looks like he has an arts degree, like I myself am hoping to get. Coincidence? Maybe.

Scientific Conclusion

So it looks like James O’Malleys are generally excellent. Admittedly, the sample isn’t massive and I guess the likelihood of having a website is going to be related to technical skills and success - but is it merely a coincidence that none of the James O’Malleys that I have stumbled upon have their occupations listed as ‘failure’? I don’t think so.

Are you a blogger? Why not blog about people who share your name? We could start a meme, it’d be fun. I’m not going to “tag” anyone, as it seems a bit rude, because you give someone the horrible dilemma of snubbing the friendly request/challenge or having “here’s a stupid copy and pasted chain letter on my professional website”.

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Cult of the vagrant
July 3rd, 2007 at 17:35

Here’s another curious Facebook phenomenon for you: street vagrants, the sort of people you usually cross the road to avoid, have ended up the subject of Facebook groups, with membership numbering the thousands.

For example (you’ll need a Facebook account to see these): here, here, and here. And I haven’t gone out of my way to look for these, they’ve simply cropped up during my general browsing of the site.

There’s something strangely perverse about thousands of braying idiots tracking the movements of these poor individuals, who are probably homeless, or have mental health problems or whatever.

It’s all a bit weird. This one, in particular, has over 5000 members, and on an almost daily basis, there are new photos taken from afar of him. Some days I’ll get up, log on to the internet, check the group (not that I’m a member or support what they’re doing), to find new photos and sightings from earlier the same day. Its scary. And an obviously massive invasion of privacy.

What bemuses me about this is that in any normal context, these people would be avoided if they were to approach you. Put a photo of them on the internet though and immediately they become a “legend” and are elevated to celebrity status with an “appreciation society”. “Oh my god! The homeless man I avoid is seen around town a lot! What a ledge!”

The thing that worries me is the undue attention that these people are getting, despite it being completely unasked for. This “case study” group that I’m linking to, now over 5000 members strong, has had some idiot radio presenters from Leicester Sound trying to chase him down the road as he goes about his business.

One of the other “appreciation societies” posted a video to YouTube of their man, and about twenty people taking the piss out of him. It was literally them following him around, laughing and posing for photos with him, whilst he looked completely and utterly bewildered - and he was clearly mentally ill and in no way “in” on the joke. They had no intention of helping the man. Some vigilantism on the part of myself (and Katy) later, and they took the video down.

Whilst some of the people in the groups claim that its all good natured, I can’t help but feel its sneery and simply downright rude to do this to people unasked for. Its not as if they’re inviting fame like a celebrity would, they’re simply trying to live their lives.

Also: Hypocrite, moi? Well no, actually, I only write about nutters who harass me. I don’t call them a “ledge” because I thought they were about to stab me up.

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Top Books
July 2nd, 2007 at 17:49

Warning: If you thought James O’Malley wasn’t an elitist twat, and want to retain this delusion, you might want to skip this one. May I recommend watching this video (again?) instead?

I’ve been having a look around Facebook again. One of the best features is that it splits users into different university networks, so you can see other people at your university and so on. What makes this interesting is that it makes it possible to generate statistics about the most popular TV shows/activities/etc at each university based on what people have put into their profiles. What makes this interesting is that I’ve figured out that it is possible to compare these statistics with those from other universities.

So I’ve decided to compare the Top 10 books from my university, a former polytechnic, with those from the university where I’m going to apply to do an MA next year, a “proper university” in London (whether I’ll get in there is a question for another blog entry). See if you can guess which list goes with which university.

List #1

1. 1984
2. Lord Of The Rings
3. Pride And Prejudice
4. Memoirs Of A Geisha
5. Wuthering Heights
6. Lolita
7. Harry Potter
8. To Kill A Mockingbird
9. The Picture Of Dorian Gray
10. Rebecca

There’s loads of “classics” listed there. Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and so on- the sort of thing I wouldn’t read but would like to create the impression that I would tolerate, as it’s a high culture thing. It has 1984 at number one. People at this university must be excellent.

List #2

1. Harry Potter
2. Da Vinci Code
3. Angels And Demons
4. The Bible
5. Lord Of The Rings
6. 1984
7. Pride And Prejudice
8. Dan Brown Books
9. Cosmopolitan

A children’s book, three trashy Dan Brown novels, the most evil book ever written, and a magazine.

Have you guessed yet? The first list in the uni in London, and the second is my university. The disparity in… high culture… really is that clear.

What makes this more depressing is that I have not made a mistake on the second list above - there really is only nine entries in my university’s top ten books.

I’m not trying to slag off my university here, as it’s alright really. I just think its an interesting comparison - almost as if there is still a class divide between universities and polytechnics. If I were a better elite hacker, I’d write something that compares every university. But alas, I’m not.

In summary: Statistics are fun!

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