As you can see from the image, twitter is suggesting that I follow Charlie Sheen. It doesn’t say why I should follow him. Do I know him? Well, I don’t watch TV, let alone Charlie Sheen. I have seen a few of his movies. I do not have any kind of opinion about him. Good or bad. He was an average actor, good enough for the roles he portrayed. Beyond that I have no interest in what he says, believes or does.
This incident brings up the question of algorithms used by many web sites for suggestions. It may be working for the masses but most of the time they just annoy me.
I have two very simple examples of suggestions from Netflix and Pandora. These are not the only ones I noticed, but I will refrain from listing more complex but futile ones.
So far I have accepted less than 1% of movies or shows suggested by Netflix. I completely don’t get it. If you think I liked movie with Charlie Sheen it, it doesn’t mean that I am going to like every Charlie Sheen movie. That would be an easy search for myself. Don’t need to spend a lot money to come up with those suggestions.
On Pandora I have noticed that most of the similar artists are artists who had a track on the same CD. That’s gross. That is like saying all artists in the same genre are alike.
The Independent Center for Privacy Protection in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein has asked local websites to remove their Facebook Pages and remove any Like buttons on their websites.
I almost never click on Facebook ‘Like’ links on websites. I do on videos and photos and comments posted by my friends on Facebook itself. I have liked a few pages that I know as well. The reason I don’t click on every ‘Like’ button is my concern about privacy. Most people don’t think their privacy is compromised when they click on those ‘Like’ buttons. They are not aware of what those clicks are used for other than expressing their ‘Like’ for what they read. Even if the websites and Facebook make it clear what they are used for, most people won’t pay attention and many won’t understand the implications, if there are any.
Is it right for the state to intervene and try to protect? What about people who know what they are doing? In this particular case, there may not be much benefit to the end user who clicks the like button. Most of us probably won’t feel enraged by the action of a state in this case.
As in other cases, this is a slow build up. Just like how it happened with video games in Germany and Australia.
Here is a look into the corporate mind that is very interesting, educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical all at the same time:
The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that’s the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.
Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
Why did “they” use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.
Now the twist to the story . . .
There’s an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses’ behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses’ behinds. So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse’s Ass!
And for the kicker, here is an article that completely misses the point.
I doubt that is where Laura lives.
