Microsoft’s evil chatbot

Microsoft is dependable, familiar, solid. Pop by Cern or Nasa and they won’t be messing around with shiny Retina iMacs; they’ll be using Windows 95. Microsoft didn’t put its name on the Xbox because, well, it’s just not cool. So when it tries to get zeitgeisty, it rarely succeeds. A case in point: disgraced Twitter bot Tay, designed to pick up slang and trends, and endear Microsoft to the sort of youth clientele they haven’t had since the heady days of MSN.

What they didn’t anticipate/care about when they launched Tay a week ago was that, in a world of trolling, revenge porn and screenshots of unflattering Snapchats, her millennial companions aren’t just chatting about the Kardashians. And so, she was given a crash course in being entirely repulsive by those who engaged with her online. Her bigoted missives – from “Bush did 9/11” to “Hitler did nothing wrong” – were swiftly deleted by Bill Gates’s minions, but the damage had already been done. Weirdly, the account sprang back into action a few days ago, to declare that she was smoking “kush” in front of the police. Sadly, this doesn’t appear to have been a piece of performance artistry masterminded by Shia LaBeouf, otherwise it would be getting a 10.

0/10

HJD

Sadistic puppetry

“Bodger and Badger are never far away”; if there’s a more ominous and troubling line in kids’ TV theme history I’m yet to hear it and, frankly, I don’t want to. Indeed, troubling is a fairly apt description of B&B, which over its 124 episodes tells the story of a deeply dysfunctional relationship between a handyman and his abusive, mashed potato-flinging badger.

What a malicious character that Badger was – brooding, selfish and liable to snap at any minute. Quite why Bodger, the Carmela Soprano to Badger’s Tony, has tolerated his mammalian pal’s emotional, physical and carbohydrate-based bullying for more than two decades (even now the pair make appearances at music festivals and WKD-powered student nights) is beyond me. Equally baffling is the fact that I sat through this nasty, brutish and mercifully short carnival of misery week after week. The theme tune was rubbish and all.

2/10

GM

The sun

Some facts about the sun:

• One million Earths could fit inside the sun.
• The sun accounts for 99.86% of the solar system’s total mass.
• The surface of the sun is 5,550C and has the texture of a cat’s back. At its core the temperature is 15,000,000C and feels like moist cake.
• Contrary to popular beliefs largely propagated by the Teletubbies, a baby’s face does not actually exist in the sun. Extensive experiments conducted in 2004 aimed to test the sun-baby hypothesis, refuting it to the scientifically accepted p-value of <0.01. In lay terms, this means there is a less than 0.01% chance that a baby’s face does in fact exist in the sun. Thirty-two leading astrophysicists lost their sight in the controversial tests, as did three lab assistants and one curious passer-by.
• The sun has a diameter of 1,392,684km – 109 times that of Earth and 59,263 that of Leeds.
• The sun is hurtling through space at 220km/s, which equates to 792,000km/h or 0.07 times the speed of light. The speed is so ferocious that if you were to stand on the sun’s surface your hair would instantly turn into Jedward’s hair.
  
• It takes the sun 225-250 million years to orbit the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s centre.
• The sun has one of the strongest magnetic fields known to science. This is why currency is minted from non-magnetic metals. If it weren’t, it’s predicted that global economies would lose between 30% and 35% of GDP per annum in loose change being pulled into orbit – a phenomenon physicists call “anti-magnetospheric fiscal migration”, more commonly known as “coin ghosts”.
  
• The sun is an Aries.

In summary: the sun is really great.

10/10

LH

Fusion on a budget

“Meal For One” proclaims the packaging, which feels surprisingly modest – it suggests we’re dealing with a sad, even shameful bedsit repast, rather than an innovative piece of fusion cuisine. The Chicken Tikka Yorkshire Pudding would make a worthy centrepiece on any family table, possibly as an accompaniment to a Ginsters Chicken Balti Pie or the superlative Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle. In fact, the only thing wrong with the Iceland Chicken Tikka Yorkshire Pudding is its diffidence – it’s in danger of underselling itself.

Still, the retail price of £1 demonstrates beyond all doubt that the culinary revolution spearheaded by the likes of Heston Blumenthal has permeated national eating habits. Even people with access to modest budgets can enjoy unusual, even outre combinations of tradition and flavour. It’s also a resounding triumph for multiculturalism – this is undoubtedly a meal that would find an equally warm welcome in the West Riding of Yorkshire and the famous Gymkhana Club.

A caveat is probably called for here: we haven’t been able to sample this dish before offering our verdict. But with concept, contents and presentation in such obvious harmony, that would surely be a mere formality.

10/10

PH