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Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

"This article documents a current event."

We've all received the emails forwarded by someone you hardly know, a call for help, sign a petition, send money now! In the early days of the Internet, there were a lot of these and many if not most, were hoaxes. I was a regular email user long before many people I know so it wasn't unheard of for me to literally receive the same chain letter for years and years and years. I was always kind of flabbergasted when someone I considered to be intelligent and informed would forward some crap to me. I would look up the letter on the Internet, find out the truth and email the sender to let them know they can stop worrying, the call for help isn't real.

I don't get as many of those types of emails now but I got one today. It was about a kidnapped girl and it was a plea to forward a photo of her all over the Internet in hopes that she'll be found. The email, naturally, was from someone I hardly know so I was suspicious. I looked it up. It turns out it's not only real but has so ubiquitously populated the Internet that when you type in the girl's name in Google, it yields 1,450,000 results! Kidnapped only a month ago, it's been mentioned on 47,251 blogs and has a complete entry in Wikipedia outlining the entire ordeal with up to minute updates.

And yet, despite this kind of exposure that a decade ago did not exist, Madeleine McCann has not been found and there are no significant developments in the case. The reigning theory is that she was sold into a pedophile trafficking ring operating in Morocco. I imagine that this increased exposure still doesn't reach the kind of people who might actually come across this girl. I thought I would become the 47,252nd blog to mention it in hopes that I'm wrong.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Daylight Savings is for bureaucrats

This is going to sound crazy but I *swear* that since the Daylight Savings time change I have not been able to go to sleep until an HOUR past my normal bedtime and I can't wake up until an HOUR past my normal waking time. Even on the weekends, I sleep an hour later than I usually do, no matter what time I go to sleep. I started a new job the Monday after the time change and I've been late every day, arriving past 9:30 AM. I had no problem showing up at 8:30 for an interview there two weeks before.

So I'll ask the question again that I've asked many times before. What business does the government have messing with the time? Don't they have better things to do? Leave the time alone! According to Wikipedia, biorhythms are fiction, a product of psuedoscience. How disappointing. Well, no wonder it's okay to mess with the time. It's just a clock after all, it shouldn't ACTUALLY have an effect on a person's ability to go to bed earlier and get up earlier.

Apparently, the governments of the world have put a lot of thought into this hundred year-old idea and have determined it valuable despite protests of farmers, Arizona and people like me. Come to think of it, I'm too tired to protest.