Posts by suspicious-mind 16 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jan 2014
"Oh, in that case 'listen up' is the twin half-sister of pipe down, shut up, kick back, put out, chill out, dig in, hunker down and a whole bunch more, all right errr, alright?"
Errr, not alright.
Remove the second word from the examples you gave (with the possible recent exception of chill) and you change the meaning completely or leave no meaning.
Remove the 'up' from 'listen up' and you have a perfectly good word meaning what it always meant, way before the first plonker stuck a spare 'up' on the end.
I'll see your 'errr' and raise you a 'Doh!'
"Why on earth would it be like a virus outbreak? A virus outbreak falls off because everyone has had it and so are then immune or dead. I do not believe you become immune to facebook or die off from using it too much. What utter nonsense."
Such a convincing argument, basing diagnosis of "utter nonsense" on personal belief.
Most people I know are well on the way to Facebook immunity, only suffering from an occasional minor flare-up now, instead of a persistent raging fever.
Facebook users where I work have switched in the last 3-4 years from accessing it many times a day to accessing it every week or two, when bored, just in case there's some gossip about someone they used to work with and aren't really that interested in now.
Social networking seems to work like the fashion industry, retail therapy or belief in the next version of a piece of hardware or software - a blind and trusting faith that the next one will bring just what is missing from life. After a while wiser ones realise life doesn't work like that.
The less wise move on to the next social network, season's fashion, gadget, etc., reasoning that because the old one turned out to be hollow crap the new one is bound to be better.
"Even email isn't really private messaging."
Yes, but there's pretend private - the NSA gets to read it and store it, but isn't too bothered and doesn't tell all your friends. And there there's stick it on a wall and imagine no one looks private - the sort Facebook users mostly rely on.
Saying that having recently heard about an aspect of someone's life which they have steered away from in conversation but which someone else just happened to notice for the world to read on their Facebook page.
"There is no reason to believe that epidemiological models apply despite the desperate sounding crap supposed to justify it"
But every reason to believe that the underlying mathematics of constrained populations whose life is a sum of different negative and positive exponential contributors applies, i.e. next generation growth / shrinkage dependent on population size of current generation.
And epedmiological models, like models of many other populations, including Facebookians, apply similar underlying mathematics very effectively, as it happens.
"That figure's not random by the way, just Google geekery in action again. It's the value of the natural logarithm to the base e, although there's been some rounding in Mountain View's interpretation of the figure."
And someone else's interpretation in a finite number of digits doesn't round?
Go on, stop teasing.
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