Sherlock’s ‘death’ and subsequent survival should have come as no surprise even to those that hadn’t read the original Arthur Conan Doyle works. What interests me, however, is the supposition of the producers that the secret of Sherlock’s survival is there to be deduced, but merely that viewers will have ‘missed’ it.

There are several elements for consideration:

• A body hits the ground. It exudes blood. A subsequent post-mortem would have confirmed it as an actual person (but evidently not Holmes) as opposed to a convincing dummy. As identity for dead persons can be established with a visual confirmation by a relative, it can therefore be assumed that if not Holmes, the dead body looks very much like him. Enough to allow the misidentification to be considered fact.
• Earlier in the episode, the young kidnapped girl reacts to Holmes as if she has seen him before, leading the police to believe that he is the kidnapper. Since we take it as read that Sherlock is an authentic character and not a fraud, he was evidently not the kidnapper. Therefore, there exists a person that looks very much like him. A person that committed the kidnapping.
• John Watson conspicuously falls and hits his head just prior to seeing Holmes’ body. He is concussed, which makes it understandable that he would not be able to discern immediately that the dead body is not that of Holmes.
• Sherlock forcibly insists that John not move closer to the building, and to ‘Keep your eyes fix on me’. We should also note the the area directly below Sherlock is visually occluded from the position in which Watson is standing.
• The location in the episode – Bart’s Hospital, is in actual place, and indeed the actual scene of the episode is filmed here. Here is a Google streeview link to the position in which I approximate John Watson to have been standing: http://g.co/maps/t2b6b
  
• In the close up scenes of Sherlock speaking on the phone, we can see clearly the outline of the dome of the Old Bailey to his left. This is entirely consistent with the orientation of the building’s position relative to where Sherlock is supposed to be standing, so we can therefore state that it is indeed Sherlock, and not anyone else that is standing on this exact roof-top. It was possible but improbable that Sherlock was observing John from another location, while someone else was standing on the roof.
• Sherlock elicits the assistance the assistance of Molly Hooper (the pathology/lab technician lady), although we’re given no reason as to what kind of help he needs. he cryptically states he needs ‘her’. Futhermore, as Sherlock’s potential love interest (unrequited as it was), it seems odd that she should not have been present in any of the post-death aftermath shots. It is therefore probable that the assistance involved the faking of his death, and that she has colluded with him to this end.
• Finally, I’d like to present this screenshot (click on it to enlarge):

He we see the dead ‘Sherlock’, but we also can very clearly see an open-back lorry containing what looks like bags? Let’s assume nothing is accidental, so this lorry is potentially part of the narrative. It certainly looks like a potentially good place to hide a live Sherlock (although the mechanics of how he’d have survived to the ground level are unknown), and also a convenient receptacle from which a replacement ‘looks like Sherlock’ body can be quickly dumped onto the street.

 A deduction based on the available data

In my opinion, the most likely explanation for the survival of Sherlock is as follows.

Moriaty had an agent who conducted the kidnapping. A person who looks, or was made to look, very much like Sherlock, in order to create the necessary suspicion. As many times previously demonstrated, Sherlock has been able to divine the identities of those involved in Moriaty’s schemes, so it’s likely he would have identified his impersonator. It’s also possible that having served his purpose, Moriaty would have killed this impersonator when he was done with him (or killed by one of the many international assassins kicking around in this episode), allowing Sherlock to discover this body (probably in an intervening time between leaving Watson and seeking Molly’s assistance), and think to use it in his plan to fake his own death. Molly, being a pathologist, would have been amenable to taking this body, tidying it up, and dumping it at the scene of Sherlock’s death at the appointed time to create the desired effect. ‘Molly, I think I’m going to die’. Thus, henceforth, and ergo, this is how Sherlock has faked his death.

The only remaining question is how he created the impression of jumping (to assume he did in fact jump) and survive the fall to the ground (or at least to the point of where Watson’s view is obscured). While a successful jump into the aforementioned lorry is unlikely, this IS still TV, and it’s possible some simple macguffin will have been employed to make this explainable.

Elementary? We’ll see….

Today I also made use of Dominos limited ’555 deal’, which is three small pizzas for £5.55 each. That got me curious as to whether this was the best bite for my buck, and so I’ve compared them all. The results of this experiment are as follows:

What we can see is that buying a regular ‘Small’ pizza is the worst value option. Large is the best value. As for the deals, my ’555′ deal is not (but is almost) the best value deal. That prize goes equally to the Buy One Get Second for £5 (Large) and the Triple Bonanza deals.

Quite logically, it’s the best value to get as large a pizza as possible either by itself or as part of a deal. Just in case you were wondering!

Incidentally, I ate 1 and 2/3 of my three small pizzas, equal to around 118.15 square inches, meaning I’d eaten the equivalent of slightly more than a medium, but less than a large. Maths is fun.

*Funniness NOT guaranteed.

If you try this yourself you’ll see a surprisingly large number follow at least as many, if not more, as follow them. I call this the follow ratio, and its very important. Huge numbers of people are playing the meta game – they want a big number next to their name to give the illusion of popularity. And it is an illusion, because a person with a low follow ratio is probably as worthless as a tweeter with 10 followers but who follow nobody themselves.

I recently happened across someone with 2800 followers. Impressive? Not when I saw they were following more than 3000 back.

Consider the impracticality of subscribing to 3000 people. That’s enough to make Twitter useless. It’s too many people churning out too much data for anyone to comprehend. You can certainly filter these people into different lists, but again, even the lists for such numbers would be unmanageable. The point is that these people don’t want to read tweets, they want people who, when followed, feel compelled to follow back. YouTube would call this practice ‘sub for sub’.

It’s worthless. They don’t want to follow you. They are not engaged, motivated fans, hanging on your every word. They are people like you, gunning for the biggest, most pointless number out there. But what is the point when you tweet about your latest blog to your 2800 followers and get 10 hits back? That’s one of the lowest exposure vs. clickthrough rates in history.

You have no idea what your fans want, because you don’t have any real fans. Just a hoard of meta miners looking to build this worthless masquerade of popularity.

Don’t look at followers, look at the follow ratio. If they follow even half as many as follow them back, chances are they aren’t worth your time.

The focus of the BBC story is on the recommendation that the NHS should pay for the funeral expenses of those donating their organs, as ‘the move could lead to more people donating their organs’.

I find this point particularly disagreeable and believe that organ donation should always be utterly without any form of financial incentive, whether it comes from the recipient of the organ(s) or from government funding. I will however post this excerpt from the short guide that highlights some rather surprising circumstances in which payment or benefit can be taken.

• Consent is almost always required before a person may donate material as a living donor, and they must be given information about what the procedure involves. After death, organs or tissue may be taken from the deceased if they had signed the Organ Donor Register or if their family give permission.
• It is against the law to offer or accept financial reward to donate blood, tissue or organs for the treatment of others. However, it is not explicitly illegal to offer or accept payment to donate these bodily materials for other purposes, such as research.
• Financial reward for donating eggs or sperm is against the law. However, women who agree to provide some of their eggs for another woman’s infertility treatment or for research (‘egg-sharers’) may receive free or reduced-cost infertility treatment for themselves from private clinics.
• People who donate their bodies after death to medical schools for medical education and training purposes may have their funeral costs paid by the medical school.
• People who volunteer to take part in clinical trials to test new
medicines may receive payment to compensate them for their time, and for any discomfort and inconvenience involved.
• People who donate organs or bone marrow as living donors have all their expenses, including any lost earnings, reimbursed by the NHS. People who donate eggs and sperm are reimbursed a maximum of £250 for lost earnings.
• Expenses are also incurred by the professionals and organisations involved in donation and transplantation. Payment for the many medical and technical services needed to handle and process bodily material does not count as ‘commercial dealings’ and is allowed.

In fairness to the report, it has come to the above conclusions as a result of a realistic analysis of what motivates people into actions, and the sad fact is there are a great many people who will only act in the knowledge of some financial reward.

The percentage of altruistically-minded people who seek to help others on their own intiative is incredibly low. Greater numbers of people will help if prompted or educated to do so. Making it as easy as possible and removing disincentives (such as costs incurred for travel and accommodation) for donating will help further. Ultimately it is a sad reflection on society that a significant minority would never do anything to help anyone unless they received a direct, tangible benefit as a result.

UK Transplant are quoted in the story:

“Currently in the UK, organ donation operates according to the fundamental principle that organs/tissues are donated altruistically and it is illegal to receive a payment for supplying an organ.”

Morally I believe this to be absolutely the right stance. The gift of an organ or tissue should be precisely that – a gift, utterly detatched from demographical considerations or thoughts of individual gain.

But I also appreciate that moral idealism is harder to defend while people continue to die waiting on the organ donor register. Direct monetary incentives, while probably effective, would create an incredible storm of opposition, particularly at a time of economic recession and future uncertainty that would see the increasingly impoverished members of society giving away pieces of themselves to make ends meet.

I can offer no conclusions on the issue, except to say that the BBC has unfortunately made a story of a relatively minor piece of the overall report that sensationalises the issue such that opposition to the other suggestions of the report are more probable. I consider the report to be a cogent, stark, though perhaps depressingly realistic overview on what would make more people donate their organs.

Education will be effective, of course. It’s a widely held view that 80-90% of all people would be willing to donate their organs after death, and yet only 29% of people are signed up to the register. The deficit is due to a general lack of awareness, and to quote Emily Thackray from the Live Life Then Give Life charity: “If there is money out there, it needs to go into education, it needs to go into infrastructure, and it needs to support the donor families who make this incredible gift”.

Sound familiar? HTC must be aware of this bug that has existed for well over 18 months (it doesn’t take much user testing to discover it, and it’s entirely replicable), but after some fiddling I can give you a workaround fix.

Solution: The basic bug is a simple glitch in the way the application internally syncs with your phone book. Upon a clean boot of the phone, no SMS messages (again, previews work fine) are associated with the phone book, and will not be until you make any kind of change to the phone book itself. Whatever this does nudges something that makes the full SMS view sync properly.

In other words, to make it work, make an arbitrary edit to ANY contact in your phone book, and save the modified contact. Your SMS’ should now display properly.

If you have any feedback on this fix, or more information, please comment below.

Specifically, AndersBehringBreivik.com, and its variants. At the time of writing, here is what you will find on these macabre sites (I will not create hyperlinks for any of them).

AndersBehringBreivik.com – A blog that purports to have the latest updates about the story. Just some good-natured person looking to keep the world updated? That might be credible were the site not filled with adverts. Just another form of grim profiteering, with the deaths of tens of people as the hook that draws you in. Horrible.

AndersBehringBreivik.net  - A standard ‘related links’ spam page.

AndersBehringBreivik.org  - A different standard ‘related links’ spam page.

AndersBreivik.com – A similar attempt to the other .com, except the spamblog hasn’t been set up properly yet – it just contains a default WordPress theme and post.

AndersBreivik.net  - A blank site with a ‘no index file’ error page.

AndersBreivik.org - An incredibly spam-tastic GoDaddy ad-holding page.

What compels a person to think registering these is a good idea? How can they not think ‘Whatever reasons I might have, this can only been seen as horribly insensitive to those who have died’? All thought of humane sensitivity is displaced at the prospect of making more money than it cost to register the domain name. A cheap, pathetic little payday for someone cashing in on the horrors of the world.

There should be some very high level directive at ICANN that allows for the deactivation or reversal of registration for those names which are news-topical and sensitive.

These aren’t the only sites that have sprung up as a result of this tragedy. A whole mini-industry of domain names bursts into life around such events. Take the registration of NorwayMassacre.com as yet another example – this once again redirects to another ‘news’ site filled with adverts. I can’t think how many other possible permutations there might be. I genuinely hope that Google has the good sense to zero pagerank and ban the crawling of such sites, because they don’t deserve the tiniest fragment of attention. It’s gross, and sickening, and a terrible indictment of the kind of world that spawns this kind of ‘entrepreneurial’ innovation.

Desperate to practice this awesome tune, I painstakingly recreated the tiny version I found into a nice, full-szed and fully marked up PDF version which you can download here.  MacGyver Theme Piano PDF.

I’ve also included a Midi File of the sheet here

I don’t think this infringes any copyrights or whatnot, but if you’re the copyright holder and have a problem with this, please contact me.

Much will already have been said about the excellent little Les Paul Google Guitar on the Google homepage logo today, but what you might enjoy are a few simple guitar tabs.

Instructions:

Put the guitar into ‘keyboard’ mode (click the button on the logo), and use your keyboard (not the numpad) to tap out the following tunes:

My Bonnies Lies Over the Ocean (Classic Folk Tune)

5 0 9 8 9 8 6 5 3
5 0 9 8 8 7 8 9
5 0 9 8 9 8 6 5 3
5 6 9 8 7 6 7 8

When the Saints Come Marching In:

5 7 8 9
5 7 8 9
5 7 8 9 7 5 7 6
7 7 6 5 5 7 9 9 8
7 8 9 7 5 6 5

This Old Man (Give a dog a bone)

9 7 9
9 7 9
0 9 8 7 6 7 8
7 8 9 5 5 5 5 6 7 8 9
9 6 6 8 7 6 5

Noel, Noel (Christmas Song)

3 2 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 7 6 5
6 7 8 7 6 5 6 7 8 5 4 3

In short, the chap that registered Railtrack Limited in Scotland had no association with the old Railtrack plc, but predictably began to receive a weath of correspondence from lazy solicitors and debt collectors who simply looked up the name on Companies House without doing any further research.

Suffice to say this guy makes these people look very silly, and a PDF of the letters is mirrored here, lest it suddenly dissapear and deprive the internet of a very well-worded laugh.