Web Monitor
16:40 UK time, Thursday, 7 January 2010
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: the roots of British public mourning, political blogging explained using hip-hop, and group theory in the bedroom.
• In the the history of what he calls the death shrine. Starting off with Marc Bolan, candles and flowers started appearing at the sides of roads where there had been an accident. He marks Princess Diana's death as the moment when the shrines became popular but, says that this could actually be a return of a much older practice:
"Grotto-building died out in London by the 1950s, but I think it not unlikely that the buried memory of it has surfaced in the contemporary car-crash shrine. However, this doesn't explain the countrywide phenomenon: we can only attribute it to a resurgence of the 'old religion' - and not simply pre-Reformation Christianity, but the Druidic beliefs in sacred sites that it happily accommodated."
• Why do you bloggers seem to spend half your time attacking each other? So asked a friend of . Mr Robertson had no answer, so decided to respond using a rap analogy:
"There are two categories of beef. The first is basically a personal vendetta which snowballed out of a few slights (either real or imagined). For example, Tupac's beef with Notorious BIG started because Shakur thought Biggie had tried to kill him.
But it's also created by market forces. Feuding is the rap game's equivalent of quantitative easing: if your sales are sloppy and your commercial stock is low, the best way of getting back into the game is by calling out another rapper. This is why the lowly (but fittingly titled) Game has spent half the year trying to get the better-selling Jay-Z to respond to his disses. If Jay responds, Game's commercial stock soars. Always has, always will."
• Group theory in the bedroom is a title likely to get the pulse rating but it is actually a mathematical quandary . Group theory being the study of symmetry, he tries to find a formula for the order in which you should flip your mattress to get the most use out of it. Seven pages later, he doesn't find his golden rule for mattress flipping but insists this isn't distressing him:
"The absence of a golden rule for mattress flipping is a disappointment, but it does not portend the demise of Western Civilization. We can adapt; we can learn to live with it."
He adapts by creating a theory which would work if mattresses were cubes and then suggests you just get married.
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