Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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You did no fact checking, and I must scream

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**“I’ll be turning 95 this coming Monday. In my younger years, I was often filled with worry — worry that I wasn’t quite good enough, that no one would cast me again, that I wouldn’t live up to my mother’s hopes. But these days begin in peace, and end in gratitude.”**

I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true. There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and…

Any claim without a URl should be treated as suspicious

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"Many a man who wears laughable clothes from neckties to socks is afraid to put on an influenza mask for fear it might hurt his personal appearance."

I've recently seen lots of people tweeting this supposed newspaper clipping. An olde-timey warning about wearing flu masks. But is it too good to be true? The first thing to do with any image of a text quote is to search for the text. Look, I'm not saying tumblr isn't great, but… I wouldn't exactly trust it as a primary source! That said, tumblr has a neat feature which makes it easy to s…

Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Feynman

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La mort, c'est un peu comme la connerie. Le mort, lui, il ne sait pas qu'il est mort. Ce sont les autres qui sont tristes. Le con, c'est pareil.

There are lots of celelbrities and famous academics on Twitter. Then there's Professor Richard Feynman. Who died in 1988. Every so often, one of "his" pearls of wisdom is regurgitated into my Twitter feed. Prof. Feynman@ProfFeynmanWhen you are dead, you don't know you are dead. It's pain only for others.It's the same thing when you are stupid.❤️ 18,772💬 132🔁 013:57 - Sat 22 February 2020 Except…

Silver Haired Bias

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Christine Lagard's official portrait. A silver haired woman.

I was unreasonably annoyed by some media commentator on Twitter complaining about the BBC. So I decided to use data to prove someone wrong on the Internet. In a recent article, the BBC described Christine Lagarde thusly: The role is likely to test the silver-haired 63-year-old, who has admitted before that she lacks economic experience. The commentator was disgusted that she'd be described as …

Tools to defeat fake news - Reverse Image Search

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Screenshot of Facebook. A photo appears to show a giant whale in the ocean.

One of the most important tools in the war for your attention is the ability to critically examine media and discover its provenance. Take this example - a friend of a friend was tagged in this Facebook post, and so it appeared on my feed: WOW! Right! Nature is Coooooool! Or is it? If "The Planet Today" were a reputable source of news, they would tell us who the photographer was. Or where…