The Old Brain and the Twitter Cuss-Map

This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.

The Old Brain and the Twitter Cuss-Map

Posted by: James Lileks under Gripes, Outstate, Technology Updated: August 21, 2012 - 12:14 PM

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Perfection out there, absolute perfection. If it’s like this the entire week of the Fair, attendance will set records. Of course, if it hails flaming rock every day, attendance will still set records. Nothing keeps us away.

OUCH Holy Crow, Best Buy profit dropped 90 percent? What’d they sell in the second quarter, six mouse pads? I'll tell you what the problem is: they built a big HQ. That's always a sign a company has peaked. If Apple starts to fade, blame the new HQ they're constructing. It's a curse, like the world's tallest building.

INCIVILITY UPDATE This link contains a bad word. It’s a map of the frequency of the F-bomb on Twitter. Early in the day, Cusstown appears to be somewhere south of Toronto, then moves south:

Then California wakes up and it’s same-to-you-pal:

It doesn’t say whether they’re meant in jest or as a sign of anger. When you watch the map unfold, it looks like the entire Rust belt is a throbbing chancre of rage and abuse., which eventually spreads south. Then there’s the map that charts the frequency of “Good Morning”:

Minnesota just looks mildly irritated and mildly friendly, which seems about right.

Related Plastered, pill-popping plane passenger provokes palpitations. Here is a short list of things you do not want to see people do on a plane:

At one point he tore up a magazine, licked the pieces and stuck them to a television monitor in front of his seat.
He also stumbled up and down the plane and is said to have groped a pregnant woman.

Modern twist: the event was described in tweets by a film producer with the most English name in the history of film: Cassian Elwes. Yes, he’s Cary’s brother. The name “Cassian” probably comes from a saint, who should be the patron saint of bad schools:

He was a schoolmaster at Imola, but rather than sacrifice to the Roman gods, as so ordered by the current emperor, Julian the Apostate, he was condemned to death and turned over to his own students (some authorities write that this event took place during the reign of Diocletian). Since they were eager for revenge for the many punishments he had inflicted on them, they bound him to a stake and tortured him to death by stabbing him with their pointed iron styli, the devices then used to mark wooden or wax writing tablets.

Nowadays they’d record the event on their smartphones and put it on YouTube.

NEWS YOU CAN USE It costs “$35 Million to send a 4.6GiB HD movie from one phone to another using SMS while roaming.”

So don’t do that.

GRIPE If you have a tablet or smartphone, this will be familiar: you go to a website, and a popup blocks the screen. It tells you that they have an app. Would you like it? Ninety-nine out of a hundred probably say no, because they just want the article. It’s like going to a bar to meet someone, and the bouncer stops you outside: I could build you a replica of this bar in your house if you’d like.No thanks, just stopping in for a quick one.Oh. Use this door, it’ll take you to the mobile version of the bar. Everything’s small and there aren’t any pictures on the wall.

Bad web design gets in your way, and makes you do something you don’t want to do - dismiss a box, wait for an enormous banner to roll up, wait for the page to stop loading because there’s something buried in the code that’s calling up crom-knows-what from some ad site. But this . . . this is a masterwork.

This appeared on a page at the Pittsburg Tribune. Let’s go through those options: on the upper left, the obligatory Facebook thing. A generic icon, with “Pittsburgh News, Sports and Events - Tribune Review” What am I supposed to do with this? Like it? Poke it? What? The confusion is shared more than the link, it seems; only 11 people recommended it.

Below, the TribLIVE twitter feed. Bee news and sports news. Upper right: sports talk radio button. Below, the “on the go” section, which has an RSS feed, a Kindle icon - for downloadable versions of their nineteen part investigations on some local matter that doesn’t concern me in the least? Boy howdy, sure! - then there’s a mobile phone button, which is really useful, since I’m on a laptop. Second row: eTrib, which is probably the electronic edition. Remember when everything was e-this and e-that? That was after “cyber,” I believe. Then there’s a Pinterest button. You want to read this story about a political rally? Wouldn’t you rather look through my scrapbook of Home and Garden tips? (Their Pinterest page has 26 followers.)

A little “Garage Sale” button rounds out the six-pack. We move on to the right: Why, it’s our old friend, Bandwidth McHawg, come to play us some movin’ pitchers right here. If you have your settings on “paranoid,” as I obviously do, there’s something else to dismiss, because the page is spraying an ad on your hard drive.

To be fair: as I later discovered, this panel only appears when your mouse strays into a certain hot zone, which must have happened the first time I went to the page. Still, it’s a lesson: the simpler, the better. Get out of the way.

Finally: SCIENCE! The victim was hung and decapitated 2600 years ago. They threw his head in a bog. The brain is still in good shape:

Considering that brain tissue normally liquefies rapidly when exposed to air, finding a perfectly pickled prehistoric brain is an incredible discovery. But a brain in a bog—especially one inside a freshly liberated head—has a distinct advantage, it seems. Researchers note that, with no bacteria from the rest of the body to contaminate it along with its boggy, oxygen-starved burial grounds, the brain could indeed stand the test of time.

OK, let’s hook this thing up to some electric current and one of those robot mouths and see what it says!

Probably OUCH, but then Please let me die in some long-expired tongue. Discovery mag says it’s been precisely dated: 2,684 years old. Month, date, time of day? C’mon, science. You’re getting lazy.