I got a message from Mozilla today (they’re the people who run Firefox) asking me to sign a petition against the “Stop The Piracy” bill.  So I did what all researchers do and got onto Wikipedia to find what it was all about.  It’s a bill promoted by the owners of the copyright of things like music and film, and it’s opposed by all the search engines. Google are up in arms because the bill may finish off Youtube and it’s not long since they paid $1.6 billion for it.

At the bottom of the Wikipedia page there was a link to “The Scunthorpe Problem”. “How on earth does a no-hope town in Lincolnshire get into the argument?”, I asked, so I clicked on the link.

At the bottom of the Wikipedia page there was a link to “The Scunthorpe Problem”. “How on earth does a no-hope town in Lincolnshire get into the argument?”, I asked, so I clicked on the link.

The Scunthorpe Problem arose when search engines developed a filter to exclude the use of certain words and because the word Scunthorpe contains a very certain word, this prevented residents of Scunthorpe from opening accounts and from people who were searching for businesses in Scunthorpe from finding them. Similar problems occurred with Penistone in Yorkshire, Lightwater in Surrey and Clitheroe in Lancashire.

There’s a related problem when parental controls replace words which are considered offensive with more acceptable words.  Thus the American Family Association automatically replaced the word “gay” with “homosexual”, so that an article on the sprinter Tyson Gay came out as “Tyson Homosexual”.  The word “ass” was replaced with “butt”, so that “buttbuttinate” replaced “assassinate”.
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Which leads to the obvious conclusion – leave the internet alone.  I think I’ll sign that petition.

We were tidying out the garage in September and I came across a couple of bags of daffodils which we hadn’t got round to planting out last year.  They felt rather soft, but we put them in the ground anyway, just in case.  And guess what, they’re not only alive, they’re already producing shoots – it’s been so warm they think it’s spring!
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In fact it’s been so mild this November that the hellebores have come into flower and the wall flowers haven’t stopped flowering. The echiums have been doing well and they’ve continued to grow during the long warm autumn, so that, after four years of failure, I’ve got some hope that they’ll have enough strength to come through the winter.  And because there’s been so much more colour and life around than is usual at this time of year I’ve made a slideshow of the garden in November.  Still bleak on the whole, so the music, appropriately, is Jacque Brel singing “Ne me quitte pas”.