Why Not Lie on Facebook?

I don't know what it is about me. Maybe I'm just an asshole looking to make life difficult for others. Market researchers want to get inside my head so they can show me relevant ads. Cut through the crap and target me with commercials for things I might by for reasons I care about. I can see they want to help me, so why do I insist on throwing wrenches in Helpbot's gears?

Switching gears.
The "social networking site" Facebook is collecting information about its members. In return, we get a personal internet, filled with friends. What's the big deal? It's free! Shouldn't they be allowed to collect anonymous information? Doesn't hurt me if they know how many people have birthdays in December. Or how many people listed Night as their favourite books.

Think of all the text on there. Facebeast can step back, run a search, and look at the buzz. They know what words are most often used, what ads people most often click on, what products are most often mentioned. Information that market researchers will pay for, assuming it's reliable.

Facebook has the delicate job of informing its users that they want more access to our behviours without scaring us away. Everyone's worried that Facebook is going to "own their photos" or "own their blog posts". Facebook doesn't give a shit about owning those things. They're not going to publish your stuff and claim it as their own -that would cause a massive exodus. What they do want (and have) is access to what we click on and what we write about.

We're all worried that people are reading our facebook messages and laughing at our grammar. Truth is, they don't give a shit about individuals, the money is in the group. They want your gender, age, occupation, location, and they want to know where that fits into consumer patterns. There is no TV without commercials. There is no Facebook without access to your information.

Bring me to my point -took me long enough.

Why not lie on Facebook?
I firmly believe that Facebook's power (over social network sites like MySpace) was pressuring people to use their real names. No one's going to pay for ad info about all the 101 year old 5cm tall MySpace profiles. Facebook is much more reliable. Funny. Why don't we lie? What psychological power keeps people in check, using their real names when they sign up for things online? Our friends already know our birthday and gender what keeps us from switching them?

I miss SPAM?

Gmail is excellent at filtering spam. I've started to miss the amazing community of assholes known as Spammers. They still bombard me with their demands to click on their links. I have 804 right now, these are the gems from the first two pages. Charm someone tonight by reading these in your best poet's voice. They're short and to the point -except the one with Russian literature.

1.
Get pretty strong bone-on!
Make her feel your wang

2.
Make it intense
Genital growth secrets

3.
Women prefer steel in your pants than gold on your hands.

One more question, count, he said, which beg you to answer in all sincerity not as a future mason but as an honest man.
He went in a traveling coach with six horses, surrounded by pages, aides de camp, and an escort, along the road to posen, thorn, danzig, and konigsberg.
There is everything, everything in her, continued this man.
Anatole kept on refilling pierres glass while explaining that dolokhov was betting with stevens, an english naval officer, that he would drink a bottle of rum sitting on the outer ledge of the third floor window with his legs hanging out.

By the way, a quick google search reveals this talk of Anatole is an excerpt from Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nice try Spammer but your copy lit and paste failed to fool the filter.

4.
Be a love rhino
Bring hot-rod to life

The Joy of Coding

I worked in html for two websites and a user-friendly interface to make two video games (See: my sweet Video game Art. Treeplanter Ryan dismounting from 4-Wheeler with his Zombie-killing shotgun). My dives are shallow but I've seen the depths of the coding abyss.

Lil' Baby Code
I know I'm an amateur because I have a brother who has climbed higher. I often look up to ask him for advice when my clumsy rock banging won't start fire. He listens to my superstitious Neanderthal babble. "Fire no start. What you think? Moon god displeased?". He tries to explain flint, or simply hands me matches and returns to work on his fireworks. The life of a simple coder is full of frustration and awe. Experts laugh at my superfluous code and poor grasp of tools. Computer coding is a language and if you don't know the vocabulary you end up relying on what little you know. There's often more than one solution to any problem and the challenge is one of elegance and efficiency.

It's like needing to hammer some nails in a foreign country but only knowing the word for screwdriver. You can get the job done but it isn't pretty -they must have hammer technology but what do they call them?

The Scary Code Forest
It's too bad that more people don't travel into the lands of code. Most users never see the creativity of web design. For the pros there are never enough tools so they're alway embarking on complicated "workarounds" like figuring out how to gracefully use two saws and a crowbar because no one has created sandpaper.

In the struggle to be ahead of the competition coders go to great lengths to add simple features. This is a huge source of comedy and frustration in the programming world. The user knows what they want their website to look like but has little understanding of the hoops needed to jump through -particularly because their demands seem so innocent. "Just make it so it shrinks nicely if someone shrinks their window. Why is the text overlapping all ugly? It shouldn't do that. Make it not do that, okay?"

The Ugly Internet.

All webpages are text and images resting in an ugly series of boxes -as hideous as reading poetry on graph paper. But through the conspiracy of design it looks casual, like something you could draw on a napkin -including the coveted "soft corners" (which are actually done by pictures put in ugly hidden boxes on top of other ugly hidden boxes. See: h*ly sh*t Web 2.0 is here! Corners so f*ck*ng smooth you could set a baby on them!). Blogger lets you edit the code for you page but I was always hesitant because of the rise of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets -a coding language dedicated to keeping a webpages style consistent by controlling all of the colours, fonts, and spacing). My understanding of the ol' simple language of html wouldn't help me.

I was inspired by the "punchleft" feature of this page. So I learned some CSS, had to discover the name of a new tool 'z-index' and worked into the wee hours of the morning. Computer work is not physically fatiguing ('til your eyes explode) and hours disappear to tiny tests and bouts of googling (see: my previous undertaking. This image was created in MS Paint and used to create the cut corners for the top of this blog. The white pixel was my mistake and gives a feeling of humanity or delicacy to the cold world of the compunet).

Amateur or expert, there's a joy to creation. Problem-solving, trial and error, and results. I'm quite happy with how the images are set on this page now and enjoyed the logic problems of coding.

Holophonic Sound

Holophonics, I have always thought that there is great potential for this recording technique. This sample requires that you listen with headphones.

It's interesting that good ideas need investment and an entrepreneur to reach the mainstream. It reminds me of screenplay writer William Goldman's description of the Hollywood production system. The whole thing is based on "reproducing past magic". So films are rarely pitched on their artistic merit but on their profitability. It's common to pitch a film idea by comparing it on two previous successful films: "It's like Titanic meets Jurassic Park" or "it's like Star Wars meets March of the Penguins". It's a paranoid way to soften risk in a volatile industry. It's interesting to see the forces that quell popularity. Was the electric car buried by the oil industry?

Are you surprised that something hasn't caught on?

I also thought that stevia would be everywhere after eating some snacks from the Pan Asian Trading grocery store. Perhaps in your world my Great Great Grand. Although I feel that my generation will be looked back upon as a Golden Age of consumerism and I'm not sure if the same infrastructure will exist for you. Do you have a mainstream? I'm trying to sign off but I guess I should explain it.

mainstream
A level of popularity in our culture which makes a thing (usually a product or information) omni- available. It has been hoisted into the light for the masses but once it touches the sun it melts and is destroyed. This cycle is known as the economy. Once a thing has become too available and obvious it is often ridiculed and replaced to encourage further consumption. The goal of business is to introduce new forms that can only be replaced in content. When some forms hit the mainstream they become so entrenched that our lives seem incomplete without them. This is the exalted status reached by television, toilet designs, news, shoes. Take shoes for example. The form has been irrevocably mainstreamed (no one can live without shoes) but the particular brand of shoe that is mainstreamed often changes. These changes are known as trends.

Airplane on a Conveyor Belt

Question:
An airplane is sitting on a conveyor belt. The speed is set to its takeoff speed. Will it take off?

I have to add my two cents to this delightful question. I know little of physics (though I can confidently name all twenty subatomic particles). Grab your Sol Niger, it's science time!

My answer:
No.

It's obvious when you consider the original version of the question from the Medieval Ages:
If ye flag bearer joggeth on the moving ground, Would thoust kingdom's flag fly true with wind?

Obviously, no. If you ran on a treadmill with a flag it wouldn't fly. But you could build speed using a wizard's moving ground and then run off the end to fill your flag with maximum wind.

But let's update this answer into our modern world.

Airplanes fly by running really fast into the wind. A jumbo jet needs to run at about 280km/hour (175mph) to take off. You can help it reach take-off speed using a conveyor belt but it would be stuck on the ground, running on the spot. It still needs the second chemical: running into the wind.

Think of the airplane's feelings. It doesn't give a sh*t how it reaches take off speed. If it could start at 280km/hour it would and take off instantly. But it has to travel the long, sad journey called the runway before it can happily gaze at its own shadow. Aircraft carriers use a slingshot to increase the plane's speed. A giant conveyor belt would be even cooler. But once the plane reached take-off speed you'd need to hit stop on the conveyor built so it could push itself through the wind and take off.

They recently did the airplane/conveyor experiment on Mythbusters (including a wonderful full scale version). It was obvious that the conveyor shortened the runway but, in the end, the airplane needs to move forward so that it could take off.

The science behind it (a more detailed description for scholars):
Since Earth's atmosphere was created by the Mugarath and the wrath of the Seventh Mountain Giant it follows that any attitude taken before the sun smiles upon the shadowedland will be in futility. Listen for the laugh of the Beegoo Root. If the seas ripple clockforth then sip on your nectar. Still on the ground? The wings of Tamforge were built in a day but they must clean the stains of Growth before they can Decay. Hug all the weeds found without eyes. In a pinch, follow the example laid down by four by forty temples before thee. Recall the era of the battle of the secret of the way of the era. And simply do as the Wizard Fozbucket would do: grab your skull staff, hop on (or next to) a dragon, and angrily accuse the sky.

WikiSlice

Webaroo 2 is a program that allows PCs to download websites to their hard drive. It's perfect for me -perpetually in transit. Now I can browse Wikipedia offline. Well, not all of Wikipeida but a selection called a WikiSlice. This is a neat service set up by Webaroo. It allows users to download sections of using Wikipedia's categories (or sub-categories). Example: search for philosophy and it tries to grab all of the relevant links (in this case that's 25,152 web pages). Unfortunately, a WikiSlice has to be under 2, 000 pages. So you can refine your search and download the "Philosophical Arguments" which is a more reasonable 271 pages. Damn it's frustrating when your selection is a couple hundred pages over the limit. Additionally, Webaroo let's you download any url and choose your own link depth -though it caps the capture at 999MB.

Bad news: The new version also has a tonne of media crap and a relentless RSS feed that could sweep the coveted trifecta at the Malware Awards: "Meaningless" "Relentlessly Invasive" and "Tricky to Remove". The other catch is that Webaroo is constantly trying to update your downloads -even if they just finished -basically it's like a sad junkie, unaware that it's high and desperately seeking to score.

My current WebSlices (downloaded sections of Wikipedia because they are less than 2, 000 pages)
* Ancient Greeks
* Classical Greek philosophy
* First French Empire
* French Revolution
* Great Depression
* Philosophers by era
* Philosophical arguments
* Renaissance
* Roman era philosophy
* Roman Republic
* Socratic dialogues
* The Enlightenment
* Timelines of military conflicts