“We’re always hacking to find better ways to solve problems”, says the announcement for Facebook’s second annual Hacker Cup, starting on 20 January with a 72-hour qualification round, followed by three online rounds until 11 February.

If you’re in the top 25, Facebook will fly you to its HQ for the final. Here’s how you register (with some of the problems from last year).

We’re excited: you might be asked to create something that automatically deletes stupid or banal comments, or corrects idiotic spelling! If so, it will be the start of a revolution.

And so to University College London (UCL), where researchers in the department of the Bleedin’ Obvious have discovered that the more Facebook friends you have, the more friends you have, which also correlates to the size of certain regions of the brain: presumably including the one that controls typing OMG!!!, or the one that helps you to post movies of cats falling over.

They stress that this is a correlation and not a cause: so if you recruit thousands of Facebook friends, this does not mean you’re going to get a single extra friend in real life. Or, we guess, that bits of your brain will not suddenly start to swell to gigantic proportions, so it's not all bad news.

We bring the urgent news that Cerqueira Anderson and Janet Santos from Sao Paulo have set a new record for social media-inspired stupidity by calling their son “Facebookson”.

The Brazilian press reports that the couple met through Facebook and wanted to commemorate the location that led to Janet’s pregnancy. Might we see a sudden rise in the popularity of the name “Pitcher & Piano” in the UK, for the same reason? It’ll be equally classy and distinctively British.

American GQ, not a magazine that often has much to offer Backbytes as we’re not interested in coffee grinders or Manhattan’s must-visit restaurants, has this month’s must-read snark for geeks: the 15 worst-dressed men in Silicon Valley (“While their tech innovations deserve kudos, their outfits are one giant leap back for mankind”).

Among the reverse style gurus, Bill Gates (“Curious how Harry Potter will age post-Hogwarts?”), Steve Jobs, and the number one style offender, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sporting what GQ calls the “fresh-from-stats-class look”.

Don’t worry though: non-billionaires like us can follow their style tips and dress the same way.

We snigger at prehistoric humans who used to drill holes in their heads to cure headaches, and in the future our descendants will marvel at the idiocy that means one in 10 pets in the UK has either a profile on Facebook, a YouTube channel or a Twitter profile.

Last week the Telegraph restored the reputation of investigative journalism by listing some of them, including Boo, the dog on Facebook liked by 1.4 million people less intelligent than it is, and Sockington the cat, with its 1.5 million bored and stupid Twitter followers.

But they are amateurs compared to Maru the cat, who has amassed six million pointless views of videos showing him playing with bits of string.

It’s enough to make you want to put a cat in a wheelie bin.