So it looks like The Rubinoo’s (a 70’s band, who had a “hit” called “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”) is suing Avril Lavigne stating that her “Girlfriend” song infringes on their copyright.

I don’t know… I listened to both. The beat is similar, but unless someone can copyright “Hey, Hey, You, You” I don’t think there’s much of a case.

Here’s a comparison video so you can judge yourself.

Before reading any further, check this out.

You’ve just been RickRolled!

’80s pop star Rick Astley is currently the subject of a worldwide internet prank. People are emailing friends with a link promising exciting video footage - porn, new movie trailers, breaking news stories or something similar - instead, they get the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit, Never Gonna Give You Up. It uses the same modus operandi as spam and viruses (remember the Anna Kournikova virus from a few years back?), but with a funny, benign outcome. Unless you argue that being exposed to Rick Astley’s Stock Aitken and Waterman hit is as bad as getting a virus. So if you fancy pranking your friends with a bit of dodgy ’80s music, use this link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0) and tell them it’s something they’ll really love.

Could Rick Astley become the new Hoff?

Recently, I received a recommendation to check out Crazy Egg. I was very impressed by what this site could do. To summarize, Crazy Egg allows you to see where people are clicking on a website. But the beauty is, not only will it show you which links people click on (which you can easily get from many free tools like Google Analytics), Crazy Egg will also show you things that people click on which are not links!

Here is an example of Crazy Egg’s heatmap of TubeBattle’s “live” links:

It’s very cool to see where people click, especially when I’m presenting thumbnail pictures.

And this is an example of the heatmap of TubeBattle’s “non-live” links. That is, people are clicking on the page, where nothing happens because it’s just a graphics image and not a real link.

As you can see, there are alot of clicks going just to the left of “Featured Video”. That’s because there is a small icon there (which is just used as a bullet) which looks like the “play” icon! Anyway, the obvious solution, now that I know about this “problem”, is to make that icon click-able.

Crazy Egg has a very impressive system, which has taken alot of the guess work in web UI design! Having worked for many years at eBay, I know how hard it is to do UI testing: running hundreds and thousands of people through usability sessions to figure out what people like and don’t like. In under 12 hours, I collected data from all 5000 visitors to TubeBattle… all without me doing any work. I love it!

There was a recent article published in an Australian newspaper, reporting that there was no evidence that organic foods was any better than conventional produce.

Shoppers who buy more expensive organic food often believe they are getting nutritionally-superior products — but experts warn there is no evidence to support the claim. Research shows most fruit and vegetables on sale in Australia have the same levels of nutrients and no traces of pesticides, regardless of whether they are organic or not.

Jennie Brand-Miller, professor of molecular and microbiological sciences at the University of Sydney, warns many consumers are paying more because of mistaken beliefs. Organic produce is usually significantly more expensive than conventional foods — sometimes double the price.

Which made me wonder:

• Would the same hold true for US foods?
• We’ve heard for a long time about how there’s really no difference between bottled water and water coming straight from the tap. But that hasn’t decreased the popularity of bottled water. I imagine that this counter-thought about organic food will be similarly ignored by the masses.
• Pesticides and other chemicals are used in the food industry for a reason. I wonder what the consequences will be, when humans try to mass-produce foods without that support? Such as antibiotics given to chickens so that more can be kept in confined spaces without mass deaths (will we see protests about sprawling chicken farms?), pesticides to kill rodents who shit on/in our vegetables/fruits (will we see more strange diseases or even simply e.coli from those eating organic produce?), etc.

Organic foods, whether they help, hinder or do nothing… seems like they’re here (permanently) to take a chunk out of our wallets.

By now, most of us know of the dangers with consuming transfat. To quicky recap from wikipedia: Trans fatty acids (commonly termed trans fats) are a type of unsaturated fat (and may be monounsaturated or polyunsaturated). Most trans fats consumed today are industrially created as a side effect of partial hydrogenation of plant oils

On my recent trip to Australia, I discovered the moisturing lotion (supplied by United Airlines in Business Class) included an intesresting ingredient!

To dive in for a closer look (click on thumbnail to see the highlighted words):

Hydrogenated vegetable oil?! They put transfat in moisturizers? WTF?!