Kyra: some friends and I plan to load ourselves up with body glitter and go see the film. If I can be bothered I might even write an article on it! Like you I'm very addicted to Robert Pattinson's frequent foot-in-mouth episodes but can't even be bothered to finish reading the first book...

> GMail's spam filters are so good I basically never get spam in my inbox these days
Hmmm. How long have you had your Gmail account? My Gmail gets plenty of spam -- granted, less than my other accounts, but plenty of spam. (It went up when I published (suitably re-worded) a redirect email address on my own site -- hence I fear the same thing happening at FB)

Huh.

I suppose to an extent you can get around it by writing things out in more detail - spin it out a bit so that you end up with the name and the domain in separate sentences. I just worry that the current method is a bit overly-oblique - spam's annoying, sure, but is it *so* annoying that it's worth making it difficult for people to contact us (especially since contacting us is the only way to join the site, so if you want to comment and can't work out who to contact you're screwed)?

A nice idea might be a common FB GMail address to which all are forwarded, and which is never published or used to send mail. GMail's spam filters are so good I basically never get spam in my inbox these days, and my e-mail address must have been found by a thousand million bots over the years. I swear they must have actual human beings hand-filtering the stuff.

Well, writing things out is enough to foil most of the bots -- at least 60 or 70%, pessimistically. But they're getting better and better. This article tests a few spam-bots against common methods, and finds that spelling things out could be bypassed by a few popular bots at the time of writing, over a year ago -- so I'd rather not take the chance.

Hmmm, it's difficult - I know there's always a constant tension between making things confusing to spambots but clear to human beings. In the past I've always found that writing the thing out in words as opposed to using @ and . - something like "warthur1 at gmail dot com" (to use one of my addresses) - works just fine. Have the bots got to the point where they can puzzle that out?

Yep, the Editor-in-Chief is, unsurprisingly, "editor". If there were some way of more explicitly publishing the email addresses without having them harvested by every spam-bot ever devised, I'd use it, but there doesn't seem to be...

I assume that [position] is "editor", for those people who haven't read the "about" page/haven't puzzled out the logic problem in it? (I know it took me five minutes, and I'm not 100% convinced I'm correct...)

Site, rather than whimsy, related: It occurs to me we should really think about the 'Friends' page since we currently have none. Alas, alas and woe! I think the point is that there a lot of sites we all read / interact with, and obviously we have contributors and commentors who have sites of their own ... so if you're skimming over this and you'd like us to link you, then drop us a note here or an email me at the whole [position]@[this-domain] thang.

I didn't read it as contempt, I read it as kind of adorable... (also, it's a Latin dance, so looking constipated is part of the territory) although Manic Judge was right, it does look like Dad's Army Does the Paso Double. I particularly like the bit when he drags her across the floor.

I'm so ashamed to be so in love with Strictly. What happened to me? When did I become interested in ... popular culture?

Now then, bring me some bread. I'm feeling a mite peckish after all these circuses.

I'm sure that's just a look of intense concentration on his face, but I keep mistaking it for Alec-Guiness-in-Star-Wars levels of contempt.

Then again, she is wearing a horrible dress. It looks like it was made out of one of Spiderman's spare costumes or something.

Here is my favourite dancing couple at the moment.

Also John Sargeant has quit Strictly Come Dancing... (I know, I know, I've recently become tragically addicted to Strictly. I'm turning into someone's mum).

For anybody who has not yet enjoyed the genuine pleasure of watching John shuffle adorably about the dancefloor for the entertainment of the depressed nation you can appreciate his paso double here.

He'll need to be, if he wants to look brooding and melancholy whilst glowing like the guy in the Ready-Brek advert. :)

I mean, if he can pull it off, great, but I think it would be massively difficult for them to find special effects for the daylight sequences which don't undermine his performance. He's likely to find the sparkles work against him, not with him.

Hey, give Robert "Sparkly" Pattinson some credit, I think he's probably a fairly tolerable actor.

I just want to see how they achieve the "vampires sparkle in sunlight" special effect without it looking totally stupid.

Or, you know, watch teenage actors try to be dark edgy vampires whilst they glow like the sparkly stickers on a schoolgirl's super-sekrit diary where they rate all the boys in their class out of 10 based on how floppy their hair is.

Okay, you're all talking about politics and serious stuff, so I'm going to talk about the upcoming Twilight movie, which I'm vaguely interested in but can't be arsed to dignify with an article. I also actually don't have that much investment in the whole Twilight Thang. I did read the first one (and, to be honest, even though I could rationally see it was fucking psychotic, it was such a pleasant gushy teenage swoonfest that I kind of enjoyed it anyway), but what I'm really loving right now is Robert Pattison (who, coicidentally, was also Cendric 'Oops I'm Dead Now' Diggory in HP IV). I don't know what's up with him, if he's just genuinely this charmingly self-deprecatingly down to earth or, if, you know, he's on crack, but he has no media-skillz whatsoever and it's adorable. I don't know how long this kind of honesty can last but it'll truly break my heart if he ever loses this edge of suicidal "I think it, so I'll say it"-ness.

I guess most people will have seen these already but my top three are here, here and here.

I don't think that a few lessons in the course of the parliamentary induction process can really compensate for a lack of familiarity with science; granted, it can give you a grounding in the scientific method, but MPs need more than that - they need to be able to discern between sound research and crackpot ideas, and I'm not sure that's a skill you can really pick up in a few sittings in the middle of settling into your shiny new job in Westminster.

On the other hand, it can't hurt. I'd extend it to all civil servants as well.

Good as it is that Tory MPs will have to know a little bit about science, why just them? Why can't we get all politicians through something like this?

Yeah, I liked that -- I also like that the BBC's still got a video about the Obamas' dog choice as one of the most important stories of the day...

So, this caught my eye today: the BBC report on a study of people's attitudes towards kids in the UK and reveal that adults tend to be distrustful of young people, and that people who leave comments on internet news sites tend to express especially nasty opinions.

The report itself seems to be a mixture of genuinely concerning social trends and a mild failure on the part of the researchers to understand the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but what I found amusing is that a news story which is essentially about toxic Have Your Say comments... has its own Have Your Say thread.

Dude! I love it! Now we just need to stop writing our nanos and actually keep fb going! But you are made of awesome.

FerretBrain 2.0 is up and running, and thanks to Arthur's help I've already found and fixed several bugs. Please let me know what you think of FB2!