Vivat Libertas

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a statistician or a sociologist. My qualifications come from being a physics undergraduate, where I live and breathe error analysis in the lab, and also from reading around the subject. Finally, I use Twitter far too much; it's really just morbid fascination at this point. Oh well. Last year, Twitter introduced polls as a thing you can add to your tweets. This was more likely than not done to poke Twitter into being vaguely profitable, since it's stagnant as hell. Unfortunately, polls are only as good as the people making them and Twitter is a wretched hive. There have been some really good polls not used as polls - for example, a wacky choose-your-own-adventure romp which started with swiping left or right on a famous politician's Tinder profile - but Sturgeon's Law applies and most polls are...well...crappy. "Why are Twitter polls so bad?" you might ask. Turns out that addressing the how instead of the why is far m...

I do love Twitter...sadly, some of the Top Tweets are complete shit, like #UglyGirlsAreNotAllowed . Why is this trend shit? I shouldn't really have to explain - it should be incredibly obvious. Apparently, however, people missed the memo so...it's pretty much the height of stupidity to focus on looks alone when brains and personality get you further, for a start. I have known many people who didn't quite understand this and haven't done particularly well for themselves as a result. It's also psychologically damaging to people's minds to be told that they must  be beautiful or they're worthless - as in, my-self-esteem-is-totally-fucked-up-and-I'm-going-to-kill-myself damaging in the very worst cases. If you still  don't understand, suicide isn't funny. It is not funny when someone tries to wipe themselves from existence because it just hurts too much to keep on existing. It is not funny to push someone into that. It is not funny when your frie...

So Conservative MP Louise Mensch has called for temporary shutdowns of Twitter and Facebook to stop panic spreading. According to her Twitter, she would only support "one or two hours shutdown at the height of the crisis as an interrupt, if police needed it." I don't in any way support her or her proposals, as they'd be at best unnecessary (one or two hours would stop panic spreading? Really?) and at worst may violate human rights , as it blocks certain kinds of communication. Still, people are making too much news about it - it's turned from "oh hey, maybe we should shut it down at certain times IF the police agree and IF it would make the situation better" to "Evil Conservative wants to shut down teh Facebook and Twitter!!!! OH NOEZ!!!!!!!!!!11!!1". This is probably not  helped by the media and people's desire for a black-and-white narrative instead of the murky, muddy shades in real life. This is more of a plea for people to calm dow...