It's financial meltdown Backbytes

Let the wierd and wonderful world of IT's daft side take your mind off the oncoming economic armageddon

Son of Facebook
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.

Tragic roundabout
Google may be losing ground to Facebook in Brazil, but it’s taking over in east London. It is fitting out a seven-floor building on Bonhill Street, Islington, into what the rules of tech journalism insist we must call a tech hub, to expand what lazy national newspaper journalists describe as “Silicon Roundabout” (that’s Old Street roundabout, just around the corner) into “Silicon confusing one-way system”. Unless you can think of a better name for the corner of east London that doesn’t involve naming it after the road planning system.

“It shows we can create the right environment to attract startups and established high-technology businesses,” said George Osborne, showing there are no government cutbacks when it comes to taking the credit for what other people are doing.

Snow joke
Worrying news that the flow of innovation might be slowing down: last week Ignacio Marc Asperas of Melville, New York was given a patent for the perfect snowman by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

The details are contained in the 25 pages of Apparatus for Facilitating the Construction of a Snow Man/Woman, which specifies the sort of gloves and hat he should use, as well as the size of the big balls of snow that make the body. If you want to avoid paying royalties this winter, it is patent 8,011,991 B2.

Universal appeal
At the other end of the innovation scale, Joel Primack, distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Anatoly Klypin, professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, have created the Bolshoi supercomputer simulation of the universe, and it’s apparently the most sophisticated representation of the universe so far. Except for the real one, that is.

It’s about one billion light years across – or it would be if it weren’t inside a computer. The good news is that it works just like the real universe (it just uses much less electricity) and therefore will be really useful if we continue to make a mess of this one and need somewhere else to go in a hurry.

Modern life is rubbish
We continue our occasional series on “Using social media to find out things we could have told you for a fiver” with a paper from the journal Science, in which researchers from Cornell University have been using Twitter to monitor the attitudes of 2.4 million people in 84 countries.

The conclusion, after two years of research, is that we wake up happy, and become less happy during the working day. This might be the long-sought confirmation of the existence of affective rhythms that dominate our state of mind. It might be that work is depressing, most of the time.

Or it might be that this sample became grouchy when they saw the volume of crap their friends were posting on Twitter every day.