AmazonFail = QualityControlFail

So, the story of what happened with AmazonFail is in, and it was, indeed, a glitch of sorts. There was no massive conspiracy to exclude certain works from rankings and searches. In fact, it seems the issue had to more with language barriers -- and an unfortunate lack of quality control administration -- than anything else.

It seems someone editing the code for Amazon.fr (Amazon's French portal) conflated the word "adult" with the word "sexuality." All of Amazon's portals everywhere are linked, so the local change in France propagated throughout ALL of Amazon.

I can only imagine the PR nightmare this all has been to Amazon. Amazon says it will take some time to repair this issue. I kind of feel horrible for the guy who made this mistake. Once the torches and pitchforks were headed hsi way, his blood must have run cold... But it's not really his fault. This is a great lesson on why multiple levels of quality control are a fine idea. Think of the damage this person could have done if they were trying to be malicious.

SeattlePI has the whole story.

What really happened with AmazonFail? Too early to tell.

The Blogosphere, Twitterverse, Facebookistan and, I don't know, the Metaweb are all abuzz since yesterday about "AmazonFail," the deranking of many items with gay and lesbian themes, such that they do not show up in, for instance in the Amazon Top 100 or search results.

From what I can gather, many books tagged in the "gay and lesbian" category, whether sexually explicit or not, were then also tagged with the "adult" category. And "adult" items are automatically excluded from sales rankings and many searches. I suppose that's so there's never a top ten book called Hot Asian Sluts or something. Exactly what criteria was used to exclude such books in unknown, and seems rather arbitrary (see below).

My initial reaction was that this was due to some sort of error, or possibly a single overzealous employee who wanted to get spectacularly fired by pissing off an entire segment of society at Amazon. It does seem like either of those, particularly the latter, are still possible. Amazon's own take, of course, is that this was due to a "glitch," but has declined to comment on the nature of that glitch.

But it looks like the full story is rather more complex than that. Indeed, Amazon sent letters to some authors who's non-sexually-explicit works were affected by this "glitch," noting that:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

It was only after the firestorm of criticism caught on in earnest that Amazon's story changed to a glitch.

As it stands now, many "straight" sexually explicit books, including straight romance novels and Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds, retain their ranks and show up in searches. But many books with gay themes still have their ranking removed, including non-sexually explicit works, plus award-winning material like Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, E.M. Forster, Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet, and more.

Science fiction blog io9 reports on how this has affected gay and lesbian sci-fi writers. Author David Gerrold remarked on how this policy/glitch was applied nonsensically to two of his own works:

It's silly. They've removed The Martian Child from their page rankings which was based on an award-winning novelette about how I adopted my son and was the source for a warm-hearted movie starring John Cusack. Meanwhile, they've left The Man Who Folded Himself ranked, which is a far more explicit novel about a man who explores a number of unique sexual possibilities. Obviously, they didn't think this through.

I'm not satisfied with Amazon's explanation of "glitch," particularly when measured against their previous "in consideration of our entire customer base..." statement. Perhaps it was a glitch, but I think it's too early to tell what happened, and remember that these books are still deranked. I can say that excluding material to appease any group's sensitive "OMG teh gay!" mentality, which Amazon has indeed admitted to doing, i's pretty much enough to make me want to start patronizing other online booksellers. Powell's here I come!
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P.S., I can't wait to check out my page rankings and see what searches bring people to this post! Along with my last post at Salt City Skeptics, there's some fun search fodder, what with the "hot asian sluts" and the "pig masturbation." Methinks people won't be finding what they're looking for here.

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UPDATE: As Neil Gaiman points out, yesterday WAS Easter Sudnay, so it's reasonable that any sort major of error might take until today to get fixed... And also -- and I can't say this any better than Neil:

I mean, a week ago, a search for "Girl Scout Cookie" on Amazon.com produced sexy costumes, speculums, wolf urine and a Morgan Freeman biography as a result. Now the speculums and Morgan Freeman biography have vanished (although the wolf urine is still there). Obviously, Amazon listings are always in flux.

So, there's THAT. :)

Planet of the Dead

This be a nerdy post... Ye have been warned...

Over the past week or so, I've started and abandoned three separate blog posts on Real Issues (such as this ridiculous video full of lies). But for whatever reason, I'm having trouble striking the right tone.

So, instead, here's another post about Doctor Who.

I posted on Doctor Who once before, and it was only recently surpassed by this post about why same sex marriage should be legal as my most popular post of all time.

So, I just watched "Planet of the Dead," David Tennant's antepenultimate episode as the Doc before passing the torch to Matt Smith, the new Doctor. Due to the power of the internet, I was able to check it out just hours after it aired in the UK. Yay! So, what did I think?

Well: Meh...

Some of the imagery was kind of cool, such as a bashed-up double-decker bus sitting in the middle of the desert (most of the ep was actually filmed in the desert of UAE), and... well, that it really. Pretty much everything else ranged from "sigh" to "ugh." (My use of words like that are why I'm not a professional TV reviewer.)

I have to say, as much as I appreciate his reinvigoration of the show I adored as a kid, I'm glad to Russell T. Davies' go at the end of this year and leave the show in the hands of Stephen Moffatt, who has written most of the best episodes of the new series.

Things I won't miss about Davies tenure:
(at least, I hope they're gone.)

Aliens that are just humans with the heads of earth animals stuck on them. Planet of the Dead featured a new one, the fly-headed dudes:

This is in addition to the rhino people, pig people, cat people, and probably many others I don't recall:

Seriously. Knock that off. It's beyond lame, and I feel a little ashamed to like the show every time one of these stupid creatures comes on screen. Maybe I'm spoiled by BSG complete lack of aliens of any kind.

Rose Tyler. Enough with the Rose Tyler already. And furthermore, enough with revisiting the old companions time and time again in general... except for Martha Jones. More Martha Jones is always welcome.

The Final and Complete Destruction of the Daleks for All Eternity I Mean it for Real This Time happening every three weeks. Yeah, I know the Daleks have been the Doc's most notorious villain since their debut in 1963, but they lose a little potency when you see them all the freaking time. Same, to a lesser extent for the Cybermen.

This plotline: There's a massive alien invasion of London that threatens the entire world. The Doctor stumbles upon their plan too late and the entire city and/or world falls to the invasion. The Doctor and friends are taken captive, but eventually gain the upper hand. The Doc kindly offers the evil aliens a choice: leave now or die. They choose die. The next day, everyone goes about their business as usual as if they hadn't just been slaves of an alien race less than 24 hours ago.

Seriously, you could just plug in some alien-sounding names in there and top off some guys in jumpsuits with, oh, let's say shark heads, and you're ready to start filming!

The Sonic Screwdriver. This should just be called "the magic wand" instead, because it can do pretty much everything. This was a problem on the original series too, to the point where John Nathan Turner (the producer for most of the 1980s) had it killed off because the writers relied on it too much instead of, you know, having the Doctor be creative. Time to do it again. Ditto for the once-clever-now-tired psychic paper.
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Okay, enough of the geeking out for now. I now return you to your regularly scheduled long spate of silence broken by the occassional long-winded rant.

Amusing typo in BYU's student newspaper

[hat-tip to The Friendly Atheist]

So, Monday's edition of Brigham Youn'g University's student newspaper, The Daily Universe, has a rather amusing typo in it...

Now, this isn't NEWS really. A typo is a typo. I know I make them all teh tiem. It sounds like it's a simple case of clicking the first option that came up on a misspelled word. I kind of feel bad for the editor who made the mistake, because surely there are ridiculous amoutns of unwanted attention on him or her now (and it's not like I'm helping). It would be a complete non-issue... except for how utterly amusing the typo is.

Below a photo of members of the Quorum of the Twelve (no, not that Quorum of the Twelve), a caption was supposed to read:

Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote…

Instead it said:

Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote…

Heh...

Glenn Beck is losing it

Bored? Feeling down?

Here's a great family activity that all can enjoy:

Watch the Glenn Beck show.

The man inexplicably had a show on CNN Headline News for some time, but he's recently set up shop at Fox News... And this move has apparently allowed him to completely wall himself off from reality.

I swear to god that he is publicly and spectacularly spiraling inward from being an cloyingly idiotic ass into a paranoid conspiricist, just two episodes away from donning a tinfoil hat and retreating to his underground bunker while the "liberals" plunge the nation into an age of godless, gun-stealing, gay Nazism.

And it's so much fun to watch.

For example, watch this video of Beck making the case that Obama and us crazy godless liberals are on the verge of plunging the nation into and age of -- no, not socialism -- no, not communism -- FASCISM... a road that, according to Beck, we've been on since Theodore Roosevelt was president:

(Video has embedding disabled, so click this link for the video)

Yep, Beck's case started with pointing out that an American coin once featured the "fasces," an Ancient Roman symbol consisting of bundle of sticks bound together with a ribbon (often including an axe), signifying things like "United We Stand" or "strength through unity." This symbol was indeed the symbol of Italy's Fascist party... Unfortunately for Beck, that party wasn't formed until YEARS AFTER this coin was minted.

Seriously? That's his evidence of some secret left-wing conspiracy to establish an extreme right-wing authoritarian dictatorship? A coin used a symbol that was later used by some awful people? Does this make Buddha a Nazi?

And it goes downhill from there. He even pulls a full-on Godwin.

I know I make light of this, because there really is no way to make sense of the crazy except through humor... But it scares me because some people -- a surprising number of them, really -- think this guy is talking sense.

A short rant...

This is just a short rant, inspired by my dear friends who have lost their jobs or been harassed at work; and by a few conversations I've overheard or been involved in over the past few weeks.

Hi there! I am an American-born, English-speaking heterosexual male of European descent. I'm between the age of 25 and 50. Though I'm an atheist, I am often mistaken for (or assumed to be) a member of the dominant religious group here in Utah, a fact that works to my advantage more often than my detriment. Though I'm a hugely flaming liberal and am happy to let someone know it in conversation, at a rally, or in a voting booth; I may not be readily identified as such in my daily life walking down the street.

Do you know what I'm sick of? American-born, English-speaking, Christian heterosexual males of European descent complaining about how hard life is these days for American-born, English-speaking, Christian heterosexual males of European descent in the United States of A-freaking-merica.

Guess what: Compared to nearly the entire rest of the world, my life is cake. I encounter challenges in my life just like everyone. Sometime those challenges can really put me to the test. Sometimes those challenges are the result of something totally out of my own control. But I guarantee you that every last one of those characteristics above means that I encounter far fewer challenges (on average) than those who posses other characteristics instead.

I have experienced some discrimination because of my atheism. After all, we are the least trusted group in America. But I'm lucky: I can just blend in when I need to by not getting into religious discussions with coworkers. (This is also the reason I'm pseudonymous at my blog. It's pretty easy to find out who I am, were one interested in doing so. I'm pretty sure my first and last name have appeared -- separately -- in various posts here... But I don't want a potential employer to plug my name into Google and go "Oh my god gosh! He's a heathen!") Now whether I should have to hide that fact about myself is a different issue.

I am absolutely tired of people who have the privileges of geography, heredity, sexuality, language and religion in our society complaining that some "Mexican" took their job, or aghast that their new boss is a woman. I'm sick of hearing about my female friends being treated as sex objects because they happen to have boobs, or hearing little jokes about how someone must have slept their way to the top. I get furious when I hear that my friend's company laid off every last one of their non-Mormon workers (including my friend) and retained all of the Mormon ones. When I hear you say that you're glad your company laid off "that faggot," because you "don't need people like that" working with you, then guess what? I'm going to think you're a horrific asshole.

That is all.

The Science of Little Red Riding Hood

It's been a freaking lifetime since I've posted. The last few weeks have been extraordinarily busy, and I never seem to get around to the whole blogging thing.

I don't really have anything to say at the moment though. So instead, here's an awesome retelling of Little Red Riding Hood:

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.