alex.mullr.net/blog

Here’s something to consider (especially at this time of year, with oodles of cards being sent by post): Royal Mail tend to wrap their post bundles with red rubber bands, a fact which won’t be news to most people who live in London. Mainly because they drop them all over the damn road.

The map portion to the right is of a road just near where I live. The pink highlighted part is about 200 metres long, and on average I guess you’d expect to see maybe two or three rubber bands on a road that size; I certainly did this morning, but people can correct me if I’m wrong. On the map below, the same distance is highlighted again… so, extrapolating the data, we might expect to see perhaps thirty or fourty discarded on the pavement in an area the size of this map. That’s a guess, and in my mind it’s on the low side.

Fine, that’s all well and good. Except the map extract below shows how small that part of London is. Here it is in comparison to most of west London:

For the record, you can fit about 250 of the small pink rectangles in that map (as long as my Maths ability hasn’t totally left me). Does this mean that there could be 7,500 in west London? I’m doing the sums logically (as far as I can tell), but I don’t believe the numbers. Help me out here if I’m doing something ridiculous.

A bit of crappy weighing suggests that these bands are about half a gram each. 7,500 per day in one part of London suggests somewhere round 3.5 kilograms of rubber. Three and a half kilograms of rubber a day? I wonder whether they pick them up…

In case you think I’m making a massive deal out of nothing, take a look at this Times Online article from January 2006.

By way of an update to my earlier post, The Guardian reported late on Tuesday that the Internet Watch Foundation has decided to reverse “its ban on a Wikipedia page and image of a record album cover showing a young nude girl”.

This apparently “unprecedented move” (of what, jackasses changing their mind when they’re clearly wrong?) is a brilliant thing. As though it couldn’t get better, they even admitted that it actually had the opposite effect to what they’d intended. In other words, many more people have seen the album cover now.

This whole situation is hilarious. They’ve now admitted that they can, at times, be wrong, which is going to make life a hell of a lot more difficult for them in the future. Enjoy, IWF. Here’s a link to their press release.

Here’s the deal, if you haven’t heard this blow up in the last couple of days. It first kicked off around midday on the 5th December when it was discovered on Wikipedia that all users in the UK were being passed through a transparent proxy; allowing content to be filtered, in this case the Virgin Killer article and image.

The Internet Watch Foundation is deeming that this image should be blocked in the UK because, after receiving a report from a member of the public, they decided it was child pornography. Whether it is or isn’t is up for debate (though personally I think there’s no way in hell it qualifies), but what really pisses me off is that they don’t even apply their own rules across the board.

The following screenshot was taken from my O₂ phone (because thankfully we’re not filtered here at uni):

On this same phone, the Wikipedia article mentioned is blocked – if you’re interested, I get an "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" error. I guess the only message I have to share is that censorship does nothing.

There’s a good conversation from BBC Radio 4’s Today programme between David Gerard (a Wikipedia contributor) and Susan Robertson of the IWF included below, originally here. There’s a massive discussion on Wikipedia about it, and Ian Betteridge has one of the better articles.

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You’ll never guess what the email address associated with this account is…

abuse@digg.com