Embrace Your Mistakes: Hummingbirds

One of the real joys of my time in San Francisco was watching the hummingbirds. these little critters buzz around your head like little mechanical drones. Adorable to look at I was convinced I would take some pictures to show my Facebook followers.

More fool me, these birds are incredibly fast and only visited our balcony in low light. So All I produced were blurry, grainy silhouettes. If you have hummingbirds near you and want to photograph them, then follow the tutorials here and here. I hope you have better luck than I!

Bain’s Law

There’s a law for everything. Today I came across Betteridge’s Law which dictates that a “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” One of my favourites is Hitchens’s Razor, a nice play on Occam’s Razor, where “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” A well known one is the Streisand Effect, where one try “to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely”

I have decided to add to this list with Bain’s Law. “The tweet that becomes most widespread will be the tweet with the most spelling mistakes.”

I formulated this law as I noticed I had much* activity over a tweet recommending a Nick Cohen Article on Rupert Murdoch.

Last week @NickCohen4 took on the Pope this week he takes on the great diety @rupertmurdoch

I giggled, put my phone away and decided to eat breakfast. That evening I re-found my phone to see a flurry of activity** it had been retweeted by Cohen himself, the Buzzfeed political editor, a few small time Labour politicians and many a nice person and blogger.

Alas it also had many a response with “Deity you dick, get it right.” Did any of my nice tweets with no selling errors get any retweets or publicity? No.

The Bain Effect in action.

*Comparatively.

**Comparatively.