From Wikipedia: In 1909, Mark Twain is quoted as saying:
I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’
His prediction was accurate – Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet’s closest approach to Earth.
Remember Sony’s sex toyMove controller we told you about last week? Well folks, the company has just released an ad promoting the “Move”, and unsurprisingly, it takes a jab against Nintendo’s Wiimote and Microsoft’s Project Natal.
A few funny quotes from the commercial:
“Because real boxers don’t hit like this [flails arms exasperatingly]”
“It’s also got what we in the future call buttons, which turn out to be pretty important to those handful of millions of people who enjoy playing shooters, platformers, or, well, anything that doesn’t involve catching a big red ball.”
“C’mon, who wants to pretend their hand is a gun. What is this, third grade? Pew, pew, pew.”
Why serve a cheese ball when you can serve Steve Jobs’ head on a platter? Ken carved this from mozzarella cheese for his iPad launch party! See the process in pictures at The Cook’s Den, with recipes for the other foods served with the Apple “head cheese”. Strangely, there are no apples on the menu, but you must try the iPad Thai!
Directed by French animation collective H5, Logorama was initially presented at the Cannes Film Festival last year and won a 2010 academy award under the “animated short” category. Up until a few months ago, the movie was available everywhere online, but it quickly got removed from all the sources it was hosted on. Now, “Human”, the company that produced the sound track for the movie, has made it available on vimeo, so we figured that from now on, it was there to stay. Enjoy!
You may have noticed that Facebook isn’t exactly my favorite social media network. There are 100 reasons not to like Facebook, but now I have another one. According to the Financial Times, Facebook traffic has just surpassed Google. Over the last year the company has seen phenomenal growth, especially among the baby boomer crowd. But as of this week it made up for a 7.07% of popularity compared to Google’s 7.03%. For Facebook, that’s more than a 5% growth over the past year.
But unlike Google, the Facebook model is just beginning to find its marketing and moneymaking potential. In comparison to Google, who took in an estimated $23bn last year, Facebook will likely see somewhere from $1bn to $1.5bn this year.
So why the heck is Facebook so popular? Admittedly, I used Facebook before any other social media network (Geek Confession #204). Back then, it was a bit like MySpace lite. Now, I swear, everyone I ever knew, met, or thought about is on Facebook. I guess one of the biggest draws for the service is its ease of use (provided they don’t mess with the design every three weeks — which they seem to be in the habit of doing). Unlike many other social networks, Facebook has a fairly shallow learning curve. As a result it seems far easier for people with less computer experience to participate. It has a far broader reach in that way.
What is surprising however, is that unlike other social media networks, Facebook doesn’t seem to be just going after communication. As the article indicates, they’re going up against Google. And Google, as we all know, is a search engine (in spite of their rather lame attempts at creating social networks *cough* Buzz *cough*).
A few weeks ago, I finally figured out why Facebook bothers me so much. It’s that, under the guise of a social network, the site really just wants to be part of everything you do online: it’s inward facing, not outward facing social networking. Certainly, Google is doing this as well, with AdWord integration. But there seems to be something rather uncomfortable about creating a Web portal that’s starts as a social media front. Combining personal photographs and correspondence with day to day internet browsing just feels a little too Big Brother for me… and potentially a recipe for disaster.
But, don’t panic yet. As with all statistics, it’s important to take things in stride. From the article:
The Hitwise figures only cover visits to the Google.com site, meaning that services such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps and searches carried out in a box in a browser toolbar are excluded. Taking all Google properties into account, the internet company accounted for 11.03 per cent of US website visits last week, compared with 10.98 per cent for Yahoo properties and 7.07 per cent for Facebook, according to Hitwise.
If we’ve learned anything about the Internet over the last 20 years, it’s that it is ever changing and absolutely unpredictable. Granted, I’m not exactly cheering for Facebook, but it’s interesting to see the way that Internet hard hitters are playing it out, and which users seem to have the most influence.
A secret document has revealed US government officials have so many programs of agents working undercover on social networking sites that they have had to create a coordination program.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained the document under freedom of information laws. The document, “Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites” is authored by the Justice Department’s deputy chief for computer crime and a department trial attorney. According to the document, “social networking sites can provide evidence of personal communications, motives, personal relationships, bogus alibis and criminal enterprise.”
It also notes that these sites can often help agents find “instrumentalities or fruits of crime”: in other words, after pulling off a heist, it may be a bad idea to be pictured with a freshly acquired tan and gold chains.
Perhaps the most amusing element of the presentation is that the Facebook and Myspace profiles used to demonstrate the sites’ workings are those of Demi Moore and a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, suggesting office drones everywhere will always find a way to liven up routine tasks.
A separate document from the Internal Revenue Service notes that tax investigators are barred from creating false accounts to obtain information, a policy that doesn’t appear to apply with all government departments. The Associated Press notes that state and local police, the Secret Service and the FBI now co-ordinate their online activities to avoid compromising each other’s investigations.
Of course, it’s not just law enforcement officials who have to worry about the possibility that neither party in an online discussion may be who they claim to be, as shown in this sketch (the payoff to a running series) from dark comedy MonkeyDust:
Created by 3D artist Doug Ellison, this amazing flyby of the surface of mars is not only accurate (it was modeled after data gathered by the HiRISE project), but is probably the closest thing you’ll ever experience next to actually flying over the red planet.
In celebration of Pi Day last Sunday, many pies were baked and shared. ScienceBlogs, together with Serious Eats, held a Pi Day Bake-Off. They received 35 entries, which have been narrowed down to ten finalists. Not only are these “pi pies” decorated in a mathematically clever way, they look scrumptious! See the full-size pictures at Page 3.14. Pies with links to descriptions are at Serious Eats. You can vote there, too, but you have to be a registered member. The winning baker gets $314.16. Shown is Claudette’s amazing One-Hundred-Digit pie made with cherries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Sure it’s not round, but remember, pie are square!
The Internet grew 20% more hateful in the past year according to new figures. That’s not in terms of losers nitpicking on forum flame wars, but rather racist and other hurtful material, plus terrorist propaganda.
The report comes from the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance, named after a Jewish holocaust survivor who later pursued those guilty of war crimes.
It’s important to note that the headline figure may be misleading in some senses. It’s based on the raw number of “hate” filled pages identified by the Center: 11,500 this year. Some, if not all of that increase could be down to two particular factors: the Center doing a better job of tracking them down, and the increase in the number of websites generally.
Of course, while the proportion of sites with such material may not have risen by 20%, if indeed it rose at all, it doesn’t really matter how rare or common a site is once people are affected by it.
The most significant finding from the research is that most of the increase is not down to standalone web sites, but rather pages and messages on social networking sites.
Another problem with the increase in numbers is that it makes it much more difficult for the authorities to track genuine threats before they develop into offline activity. CNN notes that a man arrested over a shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC last year had maintained a site containing racist material, but that it would have been difficult for officials to forecast it would lead to violence.
The full report is distributed as a CD-ROM rather than put online. That’s because it contains content, such as instructional videos showing how to make bombs, which the Center doesn’t want to give further publicity to.
The Internet grew 20% more hateful in the past year according to new figures. That’s not in terms of losers nitpicking on forum flame wars, but rather racist and other hurtful material, plus terrorist propaganda.