Jason Pomerantz Stuff

I think this should make everything the way I want it.

This is just another test post to make sure things are working right.

Haven't posted to this blog in quite a while. Let's see if everything still works.

In his own inimitable way, Stephen Fry comments on a study that finds that 60% of Twitter is Pointless Babble.

Does that mean that the other 40% is not!?!

I would have thought the pointless babble quotient (PBQ) of Twitter was more like 99.5%.

As Mr. Fry says: "Bollocky bollocks to the lot of them."

While I'm on the subject, it's interesting to consider some other PBQ's.

My 12th grade math teacher? 78%.

Cable news chatter? 87%.

Elevator conversation? 97%.

Finally, a graph I can understand!

From Laughing Squid.

Why is he climbing the mountain?  Because he loves the mountain.

Hat tip: @neilhimself

As most people know by now, Amazon was recently forced to remove copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles in the middle of the night, without notice or permission, replacing them with refunds.  They did this because, it turned out, the individual who made the Kindle version available in the first place was not the rights holder.

(Here is an excellent summary of what happened.)

BIG BROTHER

This situation has troubling implications for cloud computing in general.  The more we move our lives into the digital realm, particularly into the distributed, internet realm, the more vulnerable we become.

I love the cloud, and I'm working hard to move myself there as quickly as possible.  But the Kindle case gives me pause. 

The implications are...  What's the word?  The name of that British author who wrote about totalitarianism and the crushing of the individual?  Something about pigs?  Um...  It'll come to me...

World's oldest man
...remembers his grandfather talking about fighting in the Cival War.

UPDATE: And here what is probably the world's oldest woman!

Typing on iPhones is not that easy!

I get all tingly when high-brow intellectual journals take pop culture bric-a-brac seriously!

SpongeBob SquarePants knows its own power; deep inside the show there’s even a SpongeBob-size critique of marketing going on. Bikini Bottom is periodically swept by fads and crazes, its denizens rushing around in a volatile teenybopper horde, cheering or booing or raving on the beach to shudders of Dick Dale-ish guitar. This is the Beach Blanket Bingo thread in the show’s aesthetic, its harking-back to the first deliria of the youth market. SpongeBob and Patrick themselves are feverishly suggestible—no gimmick or promotion targeted at them can possibly miss.

It's a great article about a great cartoon.