This will not be news to anyone that has run a website, or knows anything about the internet, but I still found it striking when I logged into Google Analytics the other day.
It’s a graph of visits per day. The big spike is when someone posted a link to a post of mine in a comment thread on reddit. I can’t imagine what kind of traffic you get if you are actually featured on their front page.
Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.
This is satire, right? Like those amusing Amazon reviews. This has to be satire. Please dear God let this be satire.
After the stunning success of my series of almost-liveblogs of the British Basketball team’s campaign at Eurobasket, I decided to do something similar for Wales’s games in the Six Nations, starting with the game against England, in Twickenham.
After writing it, I sent it to friend-of-WYWG-Tom for fact-checking, and he added his own interjections. I thought I would include these, too. But in order for you to be able to distinguish his inane ramblings from my startlingly perspicacious insight, his comments are in italics. And so you can distinguish them from actual italics, they are also segregated with [square brackets]. Typography! It’s a hobby.
“ [They follow] the ancient British procedure. First they cordon off a stretch of the road. Then they dig a hole. Then they brew a nice cup of tea and contemplate the hole. Then they simply vanish, like the Mayans, leaving the rest of us to wonder what they meant by these baffling excavations. ”
Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?
There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. …
[But science is] not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby. Every time you put out a paper, the guy you pissed off at last year’s Houston conference is gonna be laying in wait. Every time you think you’ve made a breakthrough, that asshole supervisor who told you you needed more data will be standing ready to shoot it down. You want to know how the Human Genome Project finished so far ahead of schedule? Because it was the Human Genome projects, two competing teams locked in bitter rivalry, one led by J. Craig Venter, one by Francis Collins — and from what I hear, those guys did not like each other at all.
This is how it works: you put your model out there in the coliseum, and a bunch of guys in white coats kick the shit out of it. If it’s still alive when the dust clears, your brainchild receives conditional acceptance. It does not get rejected. This time.
(It’s not embedded because it wouldn’t do it justice. Click on the link and watch it in fullscreen.)
Daring Fireball linked to this short film a while back and it’s been sat in my open tabs ever since. So when I finally got around to watching it today, I had entirely forgotten what it was. The sudden memory, about halfway through, that this is entirely computer graphics*, blew my mind.
Even more impressive, it’s entirely the work of a single person: Alex Roman. He even orchestrated and sequenced the music.
Remarkable.
* (apart from a few very minor elements: the photographer, the pigeons, the timelapsed growing flowers, the flying airplane, and the sky backgrounds)
I’m not particularly into computer games; but I found this series of videos about an obscure and insanely difficult NES platformer utterly compelling—I enjoyed it more than I’ve ever actually enjoyed playing such a game, that’s for sure.
The engaging annotations (which discuss the game’s design, technology, and cultural significance in depth) are what make the videos so great, so make sure you have them switched on (with the controls at the bottom right of the YouTube video enclosure).
