One of the saddest pieces of trivia in the world is the number of people who follow Uberfacts on twitter.

Apparently this 'verified' account has 6.46M followers. I was hoping that 6.46M meant 6.46 Morons but sadly, it means 6.46 *MILLION* Morons.

Uberfacts crime? It presents extraordinary 'facts' without providing references of any kind.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence was a phrase made popular by Carl Sagan. It is the heart of the scientific method, and a model for critical thinking, rational thought and skepticism everywhere.
RationalWiki

Since Uberfacts provides no references for any of their 'facts' it takes the reader a non-trivial amount of work to determine if they are true or not.

Many of them are too ill-defined to be either true or untrue on their own. And many of the others, if you do happen to spend the time it takes to research them, are somewhere between partly or wholly incorrect.

(Incidentally, researching these sort of 'shock-value' research-lite facts also leads you into a depressing quag of equally inane sites.)

I love trivia and triviality. The twitter account QIkipedia (related to the BBC Televsion show QI) is a much better example of a trivia sharing service hosted on twitter.

Comparison of Uberfacts with QIkipedia

* I would prefer it if the QI team were even more forthcoming with references. But at least due to point 2 and 3 there are avenues for corrections if any of the followers do find errors.

** When, for example, they promote Molly Oldfield's book, they're clear that she works for them. Etc.

And note that none of this is directly related to whether the facts are right or wrong. If all of the damn 'facts' were right, I probably wouldn't care if they messed up all the other points.

According to this gushing piece at ZDnet the more "outrageous" uberfacts are linked to a tumblr account where they are "explained in more detail". This is also, like everything Uberfacts related, quite untrue. Even at the tumblr account you don't get more details. All you get are pictures, with a quoted "source" of Uberfacts itself. Like this:

Anatidaephobia is the fear that somewhere in the world, there is a duck watching you.

Are you kidding me? Is this true? Is there really such a fear? It doesn't sound particularly true, though there is a certain ring of familiarity that I can't quite put my finger on. Let's see if it's mentioned at Wikipedia.

Yes, here it is, in their 'List of Phobias under the heading "Jocular and fictional phobias":

Anatidaephobia - the fictional fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. From Gary Larson's The Far Side.

And here is the actual source:

So it's a joke from Gary Larson, no more factual than 'luposlipaphobia' (the fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor).

What's the harm, hey!?

But why am I being such a grouch about this? What's the harm?

As Aristotle used to remark on many a sunny day in Athens:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle

Shouldn't we just be entertained by these facts? Chill out and let it go? As they say in the subtitle 'Bringing you the most unimportant things you'll never need to know', these things are chosen for their innocuosness. So what if they're right or wrong?

But these 'uberfacts' don't belong to the category of thoughts that bring entertainment for their own sake. They are almost entirely "facts" which are only entertaining if they are actually true. If they're not true, they are pointless at best, time-wasters at least, and potentially harmful.

Here's the scary bit: these uberfacts take on a life of their own, and Darwinism isn't quick enough to take care of the people who spread them.

For example there are serious articles discussing the likely causes of anatidaephobia, and helpful guides for those who suffer from this worrisome-- and growing-- malady, at sites such as voices.yahoo.com, "serious facts", and "factual facts".

Don't trust that sites like Snopes will do all the work of sorting out the lies from the truth. You can't leave it up to Snopes. It's everyone's responsibility: mine, yours, everyone's, to stop repeating (retweeting, posting, regurgitating) the endless stream of lies and bullshits.

Uberfacts: unfollow.

Email and IM should - (like facebook, twitter and stackoverflow) - allow for a star/like/fav of an email or message which acts as an positive acknowledgement without requiring any other response or elaboration, nor consuming an entire message unto itself.

Land-line telephones could also have a button for this: you toggle it to the "on" position and it will "uh-huh" and then "uh-huh" again every 30 seconds as your elderly aunt describes her neighbour's friend's pet dog's medical dilemmas.

While the evil makers of Candy Crush Saga are busy filing for their IPO, now is the time for Microsoft to add awesome Gamification features to their stalled Office Suite.

With help from Indie game developer Thomas White, here's our vision for "OfficeQuest". If you're listening, new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, this is the fresh idea your looking for to give the company a jolt of adrenaline and turn your CEOship into a new golden age for Microsoft!

Googling for 'What Satya Nadella should do' showed me that a lot of people have already made a lot of suggestions for the good man to follow up. But my real suggestion is that Windows should build a real app store. With first class support for install, update, uninstall and purchase of real desktop apps. That would be awesome.

Hi there. So I've finally released my third product. After a discombobulating amount of toil, I've put out NimbleSET, your Venn-diagram SET comparison buddy. Download it, use it, register it, use it online, be amazing etc.

It's a very, very simple little tool, and I don't expect to make a mint from it. But it was a very good opportunity to sharpen up my application-production line. The next product will be easier, and so will the one after that, etc.

I've just used it to compare the ingredients between several different cocktails, in order to work out which ingredients offer the most utility. As a result I've decided to purchase limes and Bacardi. You could be drinking cocktails too, if you had a copy of NimbleSET.

My daughter Lily has been reading her first ever novel, ' Diary of a Wimpy Kid' (recommended by Joe Cooney) and one part of the book led her to do some programming with me. Yay for reading! Yay for programming! and yay for my daughter!

Here's the story that inspired her:

We got to work. Someone had the idea that you can say your name to the robot and it can say it back to you.

But then someone else pointed out that you shouldn't be able to use bad words for your name, because the robot shouldn't be able to curse. So we decided we should come up with a list of all the bad words the robot shouldn't be able to say.

We came up with all the regular bad words, but then Ricky Fisher came up with twenty more the rest of us had never even heard before.

So Ricky ended up being one of the most valuable contributors on this project.

Right before the bell rang, Mr Darnell came back in the room to check on our progress. He picked up the piece of paper we were writing on and read it over.

To cut a long story short, Independent Study is cancelled for the rest of the year.

—Diary of Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney

I said to Lily we could make a program like that and—get this—she was actually excited about the idea. So we sat down together and made a program. I asked for her help with every bit of it. Here is how it went:

namespace feedback
{
    using System;
    using System.Linq;

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello.");

            while (true)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("What is your name?");
                var name = Console.ReadLine();
                Console.WriteLine("Hi " + name + " it is very nice to meet you " + name + ".");
            }
        }
    }
}

Next we put in a secret codeword, 'Exit' that you could use when you want to stop.

if (name == "exit")
{
    break;
}

And then a secret codeword so if it recognised you it would change color:

if (name == "Lily")
{
    Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Magenta;
}
else
{
    Console.ResetColor(); 
}

Lily said we could make it say your name backwards! So I tried this...

var backwardsName = name.Reverse();
Console.WriteLine("Hello " + backwardsName);

But instead of printing the name backwards, this printed...

Hello System.Linq.Enumerable+<ReverseIterator>‌d__a0`1[System.Char]

Try explaining THAT to a 6 year old.

It was easier to do it like this:

var backwardsName = "";

foreach (var letter in name)
{
    backwardsName = letter + backwardsName;
}

Console.WriteLine("Hello " + backwardsName);

That worked much better.

Now Lily had an even better idea. What if the robot said a different word for every letter of their name.

My work friends will know that Phonetic Alphabets are something we play with quite a bit, in order to make dealing with IT support easier (see also). But Lily independently came up with this idea, without any prompting from me.

So if you're name is Leon it would say "Hello Lemon-Echo-Octopus-Nose". Or words to that effect.

                var wordyName = "";
                foreach (var letter in name.ToUpperInvariant())
                {
                    letterNumber = Convert.ToInt32(letter) - 65;
                    if (letterNumber >= 0 && letterNumber < AlphabetWords.Length)
                    {
                        wordyName += AlphabetWords[letterNumber] + " ";
                    }
                }
                
                Console.WriteLine("Hello " + WordyName);

And this relied on coming up with a big alphabetic list of words. We had fun doing this together.

static string[] AlphabetWords = { 
    "Apple",
    "Bunya-Mountains",
    "Custard",
    "Dirt",
    "Eyeball",
    "Funny",
    "Gorilla-Gnome",
    "Hexaphone",
    "Igloo",
    "Jellybean",
    "Kitten",
    "Lolly",
    "Monkey",
    "NO!!!!",
    "Octopus",
    "Penny",
    "Queen",
    "Rhino",
    "Sugar",
    "Trickster",
    "Up",
    "Viking",
    "Warrior",
    "Xray-fish",
    "Yucky",
    "Zebra"};

Well, there it is. And a big thumbs up to Jeff Kinney for teaching people from an early age that user input is not to be trusted.

I am truly beat! It's been a tough few days.

Dibbs—mon primo masseuse—sits on the floor in front of me, rubbing at my tired feet, while Carolyn, my sous masseuse, is working on my shoulders, trying to remove the knots. Cornish, the Somelier, is trying to find the perfect vintage to accompany the poached duck that Withers (my new Chef) is preparing for brunch. I try one, then the other. I'm not sure which is best. "Better buy both wineries," I say, and Cornish dashes off to make the arrangements.

My newly appointed personal DJ, the renowned "H-Dog", is fading out some Miles Davis, and fading in a little Acid Jazz. He's a quick learner, H-Dog, and knows from the slightest furrow of my brow exactly what sort of music will best suit my state of mind at any moment in time. A lesser DJ, for example, would've only played Sweet Child O Mine two times in a row. But H-Dog saw the smile on the corner of my lips, as I stepped out of the limousine this morning, and knew I needed to hear Sweet Child O Mine five times in a row, before switching straight over to Tangled Up in Blue followed by an hour of Led Zeppelin: Just The Guitar Solos.

Even up here on the penthouse floor, the glare from the ocean is striking my sunglasses at too oblique an angle: I might need to take the private jet back to Whistler for a little R&R amongst the snow-capped mountains.

I'm suddenly struck by a thought. Don't you hate it when a thought is like an itch: an itch deep inside your scalp. You feel your brain crawling; crawling and itching and thinking and thinking. You would do anything to kill the itching, crawling thought! I clap my hands and Karl, my recently acquired Master Of Knowledge Gathering, rushes into the room. "Orange!" I shout. "Orange. Is the color, Orange, named after the fruit, or is the fruit, Orange, named after the color?"

"Why Sir, I believe..."

"Zip it!" I shout. "I don't want to know what you believe. Do some research and make sure, then get back here with an answer." A good Master Of Knowledge Gathering is something everyone should have. One tires of doing all one's own Googling^TM.

And just think! Only a week ago I had to Google^TM for myself! I lived in ordinary premises, I had no secondary masseuse, not even a primary masseuse. I had to choose my own music: like a chump! I was living like a chump! ME!? And why? What changed?

The littlest thing. I can hardly remember it now; what propelled me from mundanity to magnificence? It was before yesterday when I went shopping for luxury yachts. It was before the day before that when I test-drove the Zonda and told them I'd like something with a little more Oomph. It was before the day before that, when I purchased the nice little house and suburb for my mother to retire in.

Last Sunday: that was the day! I was sitting in my cramped little lifestyle, thinking cramped little thoughts, when suddenly the emails lit up green, as notifications began pouring in, one after the other, tripping over themselves in the race to fill up my inbox. "NimbleText purchase!", "NimbleText purchase!", "NimbleText purchase!" Ting! Ting! Ting! A non-stop stream of them. I jumped into the Google^TM Analytics^TM to see what was happening. Here was the cause of the whole thing:

"Scott Hanselman's 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows." Hundreds of pieces of software, catalogued and critiqued. And at the top is a section headed "The Top 10 Life Changing Pieces of Software that Absolutely Every Developer In The World MUST Install, No Questions Asked," or something like that. Number three on the list? My humble offering, NimbleText.

I guess this is how it feels for a book author when Oprah picks up their little tome as "Oprah book of the month". Or when Justin Bieber decides to retweet one of his belieber's, taking them from obscurity to immortality. Albeit a kind of temporary immortality. Hanselman being at once the Microsoft developer's nearest equivalent to Oprah Bieber.

And now, it's the darnedest thing. I can hardly remember what life was like before this. Did I have to waste my own energy deciding which helicopter to take? I couldn't afford people to do things for me at all? Who used to pour my cocktails? I don't even recall! In any case. I'm sure that life is better now.

If the little people are worried that the fame and fortune have gone to my head, they need not worry! NimbleText will still be getting charming features added. I'll make sure it can handle larger numbers, for example, now that my own bank balance requires such a feature.

I have to go now. I just had a reminder from Jeff Atwood. Tomorrow we're going to be driving full-sized remote-controlled Ferrari's off the edge of the Grand Canyon, for a giggle. Why I never discovered this hobby sooner is truly beyond me.

I guess, before I sign off, I should ask my newly appointed scribe to say a warm 'Thank you' to Scott. I am truly honoured!

I've been working on the direct-sales pitch for my new cloud service.

Step 1 is to find a CIO (recognisable by a hint of 'CIO' undershirt →) and then pepper him with questions, as follows:

—You sir! How much do you pay for downtime?

[CIO looks around]—me?

—Yes, you sir!

—Why, I have no idea.

I take out a calculator. A big one.

—Well, how many servers do you have? A thousand?

—I... I guess so.

—And how often are they down?

—I... don't know!

—Let me hazard a guess: too often! Is that right?

—Why I think it is.

—Then do you know what that means?

—Do I what?

I show him the results on the calculator.

—It means you're paying too much!

—I... am?

—Tell me something. When your servers are down, what do your employees do?

—They... they look upset.

—I bet they do. I bet some of them look very upset. And they run around, worrying and flapping about, am I right?

—Yes, that's exactly right!

—And some of them, some of them don't do anything at all do they? When the servers are down they shut down too, right?

—That's right! They sit there. Like fish.

—Fish don't sit, but I've seen it before. Do you know what it means?

—No, no....

—It means they don't know *what* to do! The ones who are sitting like fish. The ones who are flapping their arms. The ones who look upset. All of them are utterly unsure of what they should be doing. They lack the experience. They're out of their depth. They don't have even the slightest clue about what's gone wrong and what the damn hell they ought to do about it. You need to turn to an expert.

—I do! I do need to turn to an expert.

—Well, that's where we come in! We offer Downtime as a Service, look at our specialty downtime data centre!

(I show him a laminated photo of our data centre)

(while he stares at the photo I continue)

—We have a "Five Zeros of Uptime" guarantee. Even Amazon can't keep up.

—Are you sure?

—I'm positive. The Amazons can try, but we beat them almost every day. Try failing over to our hot-swappable server array:

(I show him this)

(He stumbles back a little, he's almost sold)

—Our redundant Dell Storage array has incapacity to spare. We're from the internet. We know things.

And before he can say "boo" I've signed him up to an Enterprise Plan with our no lock-in guarantee (you're still free to get downtime from all your regular vendors) and he's shaking his head and thanking me as he staggers away, a little happier, a little safer, and a whole lot poorer.

That's the plan anyway. Mostly I lose them around the bit where I say "You sir". But maybe next time.

credit
Image of billowing data centre from The fire ate my backup. Flaming computer image found here, but no credit available for the photographer. Charred Dell servers from Rob Smith, here. And see also /dev/null as a Service and S4, the write-only storage provider.
(p.s. I read this out to my six year old daughter and she said "Dad, that does not make any sense at all." Such a kidder.)

Imagine there is a lottery, with a single prize of 1 million dollars.

There are only 100 tickets to this lottery, and, for some unexplained reason, 99 of the tickets have been given to you. Lucky you!

The remaining ticket has been given to someone else, let's call him Jack.

The lottery will be drawn tomorrow. The winner—you or Jack—will walk away with 1 million dollars.

As luck would have it, you bump into Jack. The idea occurs to you that you could buy Jack's ticket and go from a 99% chance of winning to a guaranteed win.

So, how much would you be willing to spend on Jack's ticket? And how much would it take for Jack to part with his ticket?

Standard probability tells us that Jack's ticket has a face value of 1 percent of 1 million dollars, or $10,000.

So if Jack is 'rational' he should be willing to sell it for any value over $10,000. And you should be willing to purchase it for anything less than $10,000. Hence it's unlikely that a trade will occur, as there is no price that is pleasing to both of you.

This isn't a new question. It's a variation on 'the Allais paradox' and two groups of people, psychologists and 'behavioural economists', have been investigating this area practically non-stop for the last sixty years.

Here's what the research predicts in this situation:

Jack is unlikely to part with his ticket for less than 5.5 times its face value. He values it at around $55,000. Optimism in Jack's situation is very high!

Given such an irrational opinion on Jack's part, you should now consider it very unlikely that a trade will take place.

But we haven't looked at the remaining part of the question. How much would you be willing to spend to go from a 99% to 100% chance of winning that million dollars?

You're likely to spend up to 8.8 times the face value of the ticket: up to $88,000. Irrational pessimism on your part is far stronger than Jack's irrational optimism! So there is a chance that a deal will be struck, possibly in the range from $55,000 to $88,000, far higher than the rational price of $10,000.

This and other disquieting aspects of human behaviour are covered in great detail in the book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' written by Nobel prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. My wife received a free copy, which she gave to me. Now, thanks to the endowment effect, I would be unwilling to part with it for less than 2.5 times the market price.

(The 'Allais paradox' is covered in Chapter 29, 'The Fourfold Pattern'.)

Previously:

• How to Be Depressed
• The Yerkes-whatzy law of who now?
• Is Corporate IT a form of emotional abuse?

Interior. Restaurant. Customer surveys a large menu.

[Waiter with French accent]—And for you, sir?

[Customer]—A bottle of the '98 Moët.

—I am sorry sir, we are out of the '98 Moët.

—Fine then, the '99.

—I am sorry sir we are completely out of the Moët.

—Cristal then?

—Again sir, my apologies, there is no Cristal.

—Do you have any Champagne at all?

—I am very sorry sir, we have no Champagnes at all.

—Sparkling mineral water then.

—Sorry sir, but...

—Tap water!

—I am sorry sir, the taps are...

—Anything! Do you have anything?

—We have a large forest leaf, which has been left out overnight to capture the condensation from the air, and you are invited to sip the condensed dew drops from the verdant fringe of the leaf.

—Okay, one forest leaf.

—Certainly sir [he begins to walk off] my apologies sir, I have just recalled that we are now entirely out of forest leaves.

—What's left?

—I can only offer you to suckle on the sweaty armpit of a rather tired sous-chef.

—Two of those.

[waiter takes away the menu]

—Sir has made an exquisite choice.

A flowchart of what programmers do at work all day.

I've probably drawn this picture 100 times. In meetings or on the bus, while trying to get started on human or technical problem I don't understand, at times when I'M STUCK.

I was cleaning up today, and took a photo of one copy of it, before I threw it out. I put it on instagram, so I could feel 'done' about it.

Then Jeff Atwood tweeted it and next thing WOW. I can barely get onto my phone for it exploding with news about comments and retweets, from programmers all over the world, who seem to feel exactly the same way a lot of the time.

Thank you ;-)

Previously:

• How to be a programmer
• The Utterly Thorough Guide To Awesome Application Compatibility on Windows 7