LinkSpaz

My esteemed Bowlie colleague Shoelace does a thing called sPazAmping on his blog where he sets his sentient MP3 player on random and the writes about whatever it throws at him. Its an entertaining read from time to time. Kind of like a stream of consciousness way of writing a blog, the writer doesn't know what its going to be like when he starts.

My MP3 player, iTunes, since it lost my WD MyBook has every single track listed as zero plays, this annoys me about 2 points, so I'm workingthrough listening to every single track on it, all six thousand of them in alphabetical order. I'm up to the Beatles right now after a nice stint with Bearsuit and a brief stint with the Beastie Boys. Uncle Bill would be proud.

Anyhoo, here's my vague idea for a stream of consciousness blog entry, henceforth named LinkSpaz:-

Flavour of the day is this Damian Green business, so I'm going to read the internet about it and post up all the links here...

Spectator Coffeehouse - A Higher Standard
We shouldn't be comparing the Green incident with Zimbabwe, we should be comparing it to our expectations of the UK

The Guardian - Why doesn't anyone say "not in Britain"
Interesting reading about the Sally Murrer case of a stupid police investigation against a journalist which was thrown out of court on a EU technicality which the judge was objecting to but could not resist.

The Times - I feel violated not victorious
The prosecution against Sally Murrer cost £1,000,000? Can we have that money back now please? How may taxpayer hours is that?

Samizdata - Why the Damian Green affair is very good news
Its the Nu-Labour atmosphere that made the police think the Green thing is feasible.

Ooh, when I mentioned taxpayer hour earlier, I kind of figured it would be a quantative measure of government waste that someone else had figured out already. From a quick look on google it seems I just made up something new, a measure of hour long your average citizen has to work to pay for any government thing. Like when some civil service secretary just buys a full price train ticket for her boss instead of spending five minutes extra seeing if there is a cheaper one at a fraction of the price, you could say that it would have been worth six taxpayer hours.

But after a bit more thought, how could you quantify this for civil servants who pay tax? Could the just be paid 50% less and taken out of the tax system?

A worrying twitter update
The other day / week, there was a friend on Facebook who hadn't updated her Facebook profile or left any comments or messages or anything for months and months, since she went away to travel around america and being without phone there was no way any of her friends in the UK could contact her, and we were worried. What do you do in that sort of situation? Call the police, put out message on every social media avenue, or just wait? I pinged a mutual friend who investigated further, and it seems she's okay. Dunno what this tweet is about though.

New York Times - The Napoleon Dynamite problem
Yay for datamining and statistics. Its difficult, and you gotta remember if the police are doing it to find criminals, they're not going to be very good at it.