Well, I'm already a follower of New Zealand's Prime Minister, John Key, who twits (or someone does on his behalf) about once a day. So I guess tweets from Whitehall isn't a
surprise - the only surprise might be why it's taken them so long to get moving.
Or perhaps it isn't a surprise. To get the thing up and running, a civil servant named Alan Travis has written a twenty-page booklet telling fellow civil servants how to use Twitter to the best bureaucratic degree.
I suppose 20 pages isn't too much - after all, I've just come across an rv extended warranty that runs to a good number of pages. Guess it's important that that sort of thing should be laid out clearly and precisely.
Which is more than I can say for the warranty that should have covered my wife's cellphone. The mobile went peculiar the other day, refusing to accept it's own recharger, and so she took it back to the shop she bought it from. Imagine her surprise (and mine) when she was told a few days later that the repair shop said she must have got it wet, as the battery was moisture-laden and the inner workings were corroded!
I went in today to talk to the shop people: they weren't impressed. I won't go into the long discussion we had, but the guy, (the assistant manager) came to the talk determined that they were right in every respect. Talk about a little bureaucrat! Guess which shop we won't be buying anything else from.
If Webitz seems a little obsessed of late with weight loss pills, don't worry - it's nothing untoward. The obsession with such things is a worldwide phenomenon (well, when I say worldwide, of course, I mean the Western world - the Western world thinks it isworldwide, most of the time).
Even here in New Zealand we have the All Blacks, our most important rugby team, being charged with being overweight and obese. Something is awry. It's that ridiculous Body Mass Index, which somehow seems to think we should all look the same, and fails to take into account the possibility that some of us are just big-boned, or have large heads, or feet, or lots of actual real muscles.
Either that or the BMI is just one big long-lasting April Fool's joke. In fact, in another area, science is becoming so peculiar that it's hard to tell the real stories from the April Fool's one. The date on which they're published is about the only indication that they're not hoaxes.
For starters there's one about Artificial Intelligence becoming so clever that some scientists are worried that it might take over from humans. Of course, this is the stuff of fiction and movies (I, Robot, in both cases, for instance, or Hal in 2001), but scientists seem to think that it's going to become a reality.
Unfortunately, they're not helped by the likes of this kind of statement to the media: “Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.” Technologists are replacing religion? With what? Ideas resonating with the Rapture? Sounds good, but does it actually mean anything? Methinks not.
And as if it wasn't bad enough having scientists worrying about the Rapture (I thought, according to some of the atheist sites on Orble, that scientists were all atheists too, so why would they even consider the Rapture?), then we have another bunch of scientists - synthetic biologists in this case - telling us that bacteria can compute faster than anything made from silicon.
I read this last statement more than once, and then read through the article, and it still sounds like an April Fool's joke to me, even though it was published in July. (It could be that the scientists have been buried away with their bacteria so long they're lost track of the calendar, of course.)
Apparently the bacteria can solve the Hamiltonian path problem in a very short time (the link attached to that phrase will lead you to a piece of Wikipedia which makes almost no English sense to me). Why the bacteria would want to do this is anyone's guess. Why synthetic biologists thought this was the sort of puzzle bacteria would thrive on is also anyone's guess.
Here's an extract from the article: The researchers coded a simplified version of the problem, using just three cities, by modifying the DNA of Escherichia coli bacteria. The cities were represented by a combination of genes causing the bacteria to glow red or green, and the possible routes between the cities were explored by the random shuffling of DNA. Bacteria producing the correct answer glowed both colours, turning them yellow.
Does that make any sense? Do we really want a bunch of bacteria in our computers sorting out what I'm typing, or drawing pictures of my grandchildren, or thinking their a real live form of artificial intelligence, and telling us what we should be using our computers for?
Some while ago there was an idea that we could have 'mats' on our computer desks that would do away with all those pernicious wires that clog up the underside of the average computer area. Well, I guess that's still in the pipeline, but it looks like it's been pipped at the post by a new idea, one that requires nothing visible at all....virtually.
This system exploits "resonance", an approach in which energy transfer becomes much more efficient when a certain frequency is applied. When two objects have the same resonant frequency, they exchange energy strongly without having an effect on other, surrounding objects. A basic version of this is the way in which wine glasses can be broken by a certain pitch of sound. But this resonance system will be much more reliable than the 'system' that breaks up the average wine glass.
Brought to fruition by the company Witricity, this approach exploits the resonance of low frequency electromagnetic waves. The system uses two coils, one embedded in the object needing power, and the other plugged into the mains. As soon as an object, such as a computer, is within range of the plugged-in coil, the computer begins to charge up. (Just as the best diet pills will immediately charge up the fat - one might say!)
There's no danger to people in the vicinity getting harmed by the resonances: the plugged-in coil will only interact with the object's coil. Humans don't resonate on the same wavelength.
Being somewhat electrically-challenged, I don't completely understand the ins and outs of this, but it's explained very well in the article by Jonathan Fildes, writing for the BBC News. He was at the demonstration of it that took place in Oxford during the TED Global conference. Read it here and watch the videos.
The anti-malware firm Trend Micro has detected what is being described as the first mobile botnet (software robots that run
automatically or even autonomously).
Netguide warns that "The malware is a source file that works through the Symbian operating system installed in many mobile devices, and could be downloaded by unsuspecting users from malicious mobile Web sites."
Twitter is going crazy in all sorts of directions. Here are just two recent examples, courtesy of that ever-reliable news source, NetGuide.
At the rate of about twelve tweets a day, the Queen (or rather, the more impersonal, The Palace) is tweeting about such exciting events as: the changing of the guards, links to YouTube videos, and details of the various Royal visits and duties. Of course, you don't have to be monarchy-focused to become a follower to this twittering, but I suspect it probably helps. This is the address if you want follow the Palace's day-to-day events: twitter.com/BritishMonarchy
We're in the middle of renovations: redoing the kitchen, and expanding it into the next room. (As it was for quite a number of years while the kids were growing up - we then put a wall back between the two rooms).
At the moment both of us are home from work, one with the flu and me with a cold. And in the middle of all that feeling unwell, I discovered the hot water tank was leaking slowly - which means a new hot water tank. Just to add to the cost of everything that's being done. Pooh
surprise - the only surprise might be why it's taken them so long to get moving. 
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