Needs to work on its composition skills…

If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if a sea turtle managed to get hold of a camera in a waterproof case and shoot its own videos, wonder no longer. The camera was dropped in the water near Aruba and has resurfaced 7 months later in Key West.

Death by kitty

I never thought about it much besides it being a plot element in Trainspotting, but apparently toxoplasmosis could be a bigger influence in human behavior than people think.

Oh sure, just don’t let that stop the shrill hysteria!

In the UK a drug nicknamed “meow” was outlawed following what appeared to be the death of two users (imagine if alcohol had been outlawed after a mere two drinkers had died of it!). The ban came swiftly amid much public outrage; however it turns out that neither of the “victims” had taken the drug at all.

Part thriller and part environmental snuff flick

If you want to see what millions of gallons of crude look like as they pour into the ocean, as well as what people with robots are trying to do about it, check out the live ROV monitoring of the damaged riser that is causing the leak of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Hosted by BP and featuring robots.

Something for today’s generation to think about

In today’s “upload to Youtube” world, many evidently need reminding that even though you can post it online, maybe you shouldn’t.

Quitting Facebook

I must be starting to show my age a little bit. My back aches and I get muscle cramps with worrying regularity, I don’t in fact like the new-fangled music that young people appreciate so much, but especially I’ve come to reflect on how much I am *not* an exhibitionist. If friends are getting together and I’m the only one with a camera, there will be few pictures taken, and I’ve noticed how antithetical that is to today’s generation, who prefer to go in for the “share everything and hold back nothing” approach to partying and life in general.

Good on them though, I’m not the kind of person who thinks that his way is the only correct way for everybody, and indeed I’ve little patience for those who do. And that, in somewhat of a roundabout way, is why I’ve decided to shut down my Facebook account permanently.

The crux of my problem with Facebook is, in a way, that it is designed for young people who are by and large still in college, even though it is now used by a much wider variety of people; still, it’s not the audience itself so much as the obsession that Facebook has with denying that any such thing as privacy exists. It wasn’t always that way; initially it was conceived as a means for people in colleges and universities to have a sort of common platform with which they could keep in touch with friends and classmates. If you didn’t have a university email account, you were deliberately left out and therefore wouldn’t be able to see who or what was on Facebook, which is pretty good privacy.

Since then Facebook seems to have done a 180. Essentially they started making more and more formerly-private things public with scant notification only delivered after the fact, a bit like a friend you thought you could confide in but who ends up telling everyone at the party your little secrets. This wasn’t done all at once of course, as this informative infographic shows. Nor was it done out of a dogmatic desire for a more open society, but out of the founder’s desire to cash in by turning his site into the data-miner’s dream database in the hopes of attracting buyers.

Of course there are some people who say that all you need to do is watch for updated TOS and privacy policy on the Facebook site. Frankly, that still sucks. It’s like inviting “that guy” to a party at your place, you know, that guy who always drinks too much, that guy who ends up throwing up all over your bathroom and groping every woman there, that guy who ends every evening with a (thankfully drunken and abortive) fight. You could invite that guy to a party and have to spend all night keeping an eye out for him. Or, you could decide that his company’s not worth it and just not invite him. The second way is a lot more fun usually. My point is that Facebook just isn’t worth the bother at this point.

More disturbingly Facebook’s “make everything public” strategy has cost many people dearly. Content on people’s Facebook pages has been used to justify firing people, denying people promotions, or not hiring them at all. Pictures on Facebook have lead to people being arrested (I’m not saying it was without cause, but it’s still a concern). This is all a part of the public record and easily looked up. Clearly there are very significant negatives to having a Facebook account in the first place, and I’m not enough of a “2.0” kind of guy to think that the upsides of Facebook outweigh its downsides. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about the users, as long as he can squeeze more money out of the site. Remember Beacon? that was possibly the biggest intentional privacy black hole of the 2000s, yet it was only withdrawn very reluctantly (a class action lawsuit had to be launched) with no sign that Zuckerberg ever thought there was anything wrong with it, and without any guarantee that it wouldn’t rear its ugly head again in one way or another.

Some people are really into social networking; to be without Facebook would be like death to them… but I’m not one of those people. Yes, it’s quite useful if a former colleague or classmate now somewhere else is looking for you, but I’ve had a web site long enough that if you type my name in Google you’ll find this site, which is handy enough for me to share my thoughts with the world.

So, that’s my beef with Facebook. Why bother writing this? Well, I have a number of friends and family who are on the site and may wonder why I’m not on it anymore — now you know.

An interesting twist to “fiddling while Rome burns”

As if there weren’t already enough known reasons that lead the North American economy to collapse in 08, here’s another — the SEC didn’t see anything bad developing because its staff was too busy looking at porn. So they didn’t see it coming because they were distracted looking at a lot of people coming. They lost sight of the money and concentrated on the money shots. [insert your own porn-themed joke here].

A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office.

Yes, perseverance is often something to be commended, but it’s really time for that guy to admit he has a problem.

How entirely appropriate!

You may or may not know, but this week is National Procrastination Week. I really wanted to mention this before Thursday, but, you know.

Another place to avoid as a vacation spot…

Imagine this scene — you’ve booked a week’s holiday and enjoyed a bit of Eastern Europe with its tall, leggy blondes and fine beer. You’re getting on a flight to get back to work. Unbeknownst to you Slovakian police have planted explosives in your bag to test their airport security systems, which fail to detect the suspect substance, and now you’re flying at 20,000 feet sitting on top of a bomb and towards arrest. Sounds unlikely? It happened just in the past week.

Feel safer when flying now? Didn’t think so.

When the going gets tough, gutless cowards cut and run

Yes it’s true, Stephen Harper has now suspended Canadian democracy for two months, for no reason except that he found himself unable to shove unacceptable bills down the nation’s throat. What a good way of starting 2010, under a right-wing dictatorship from Alberta. Eventually we will all see this Conservative government for the miserable, catastrophic blight on this country’s history that it is, but by then it just might be too late and Calgary’s neo-Texans might well have sold our future down the river already.

Of course Harper (whom I will never call either Right nor Honorable as I eschew lies) is not the sole person to blame here. A special mention goes to the most incompetent Governor-General in the country’s history, Michaelle Jean, who’s probably too busy jet-setting around the world to realize that the GG’s job is supposed to consist of doing more than just turning to Harper and asking “oh I don’t know, what do YOU think I should do?”.