The most pointless article ever?

The Earth could find itself with a ‘second sun’ for a period of weeks later this year when one of the night sky’s most luminous stars explodes, scientists have claimed.

So runs this recent article in The Telegraph entitled “‘Second sun’ on its way”.

Apparently…

…the explosion could take place before the end of the year – or indeed at any point over the next million years.

 

Why is news so rubbish?

For some reason the whole WikiLeaks/Julian Assange thing has left me a little bit cold possibly because, based on the way it has been reported, I couldn’t get excited about either point of view. No, the leaks are not particularly revelatory; and no, I don’t think Assange is a danger to the world/the state/whatever.

But that is based on mainstream media “reporting”, which so perhaps be relabelled mainstream media echoing and regurgitation.

However, on the wonderful interwebs, I found this analysis of what Julian Assange is actually trying to achieve and the thinking behind it, from zunguzungu:

But, to summarize, he [Assange] begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.

You may agree or disagree with the analysis of what this guy claims Assange is doing; and you may have very strong views either way on whether or not it is a good idea and whether or not he should be “allowed” to continue.

But where, where in the wretched 24-hour rolling news and half-hourly headlines does anything approaching a coherent analysis appear? You’d think 24-hour news channels would have time to devote to deep analysis of world events, but apparently its just a race to see which channel can go through the same trite headlines most in an given time period.

Ho hum.

Is turquoise the new black?

Is turquoise the new black?

Suddenly, has everyone gone crazy for such-and-such?

Have you noticed how these days everyone is doing/wearing/reading a particular thing?

Or are all statements like those just the biased observations on their circle of very similar friends of an exceedingly tiny and homogenous group of “opinion formers” and columnists? You know the ones. If you are in the UK they think everyone lives in London, personally knows politicians, and that £50k a year puts them in the middle of the distribution of salaries.

Signal versus noise

We were tearing up old newspapers the other day for a craft project, and so had a quickfire roundup of the daily news headlines over the summer. All just noiseI realised, with very little signal. This is not to blame the newspapers, just to say that nearly all of the most important events over the last 24 hours (any last 24 hours) is not that important at all.

Most politics reporting is noise. What Miliband/Fox/IDS/Johnson/whoever said yesterday to a reporter or what some unidentified source said about something is not that important. That’s all noise. The signal is Labour out; coalition in; “cuts” ahead.

“Business” reporting is noise. Stock markets and currency exchanges aren’t really business anyway (not to disparage them, just stating a fact); and the intra-day movements of either are just noise unless you are a day trader, which you aren’t. The signal is data over quarters and years, not hours.

Sports reporting that isn’t reporting on an actual match is noise. I hate it when England are playing cricket yet the sports pages lead on close-season transfer speculation in football.

Celebrity news is noise. There is no signal.