I’m sure you split stories like this into two pages for a good reason: to save my bandwidth. After all, the remaining 3,126 characters of the story’s body (1,530 bytes as transferred with gzip compression) would have increased the page’s total size by 0.32%.
No, I’m just yanking your chain. I know you’re double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It’s just like the old auto-frame-refresh trick, but this one’s better because most of the ad networks haven’t banned it yet. That’s their problem, right? Why should you leave money on the table? You’re a business.
But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two. You know that, but you don’t care, because you won’t give up a chance to make a few extra cents. Who cares if it annoys the crap out of that tiny slice of your audience? Who are they, anyway? The people who actually read your content thoroughly instead of skimming the headline and moving on? That can’t possibly be your most important audience segment — they’re just the most involved and attentive. Repeat customers. You already have their “eyeballs” that you can sell to your real customers. And these dupes get their eyeballs double-counted. What a steal!
Keep up the great work, publishers.
I got the opportunity to visit the recently opened Darwin Centre this weekend. Read more about why it’s a bit special here. It certainly involves an interesting mix of physical objects, touch screens with the website and a bar code card acting as your very own harddrive of the experience. 
Thanks to Max and Molly for taking me along.
"A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. Those are good things. But a mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge."
—
- Michael Chabon on Storytelling for kids
(via @eovemar)
When Jay-Z gets hungry…
Yup, there’s more than my yearly salary in one food receipt.
A YEAR’S SALARY.
FML.
"…as Edson explains his world. Carbon-fiber angels watching the city by day and night, never ceasing, never hasting. Universal arfid tagging and monitoring where clothes on your back and the shoes on your feet and the toys in your pocket betray you. Total surveillance from rodovia toll cameras to passersby’s T—shirts or I-shades snatching casual shots; only the rich and the dead have privacy. Information not owned but rented; date stamped music and designer logos that must be constantly updated: intellectual property rights enforceable with death but murder pay-per-view prime time entertainment and pay-per-case policing. Every click of the Chillibeans, every message and call and map, every live Goooool! update, every road toll and every cafezinho generates a cloud of marketing information, a vapor trail across Sampa’s information sphere. Alibis, mulitple identities, backup selves - it’s not safe to be one thing for too long. Speed is life. She will be trying to work out how she can exist - must exist - in this world of Order and Progress, with no scan no print no number, a dead girl come back to life. As he is a dead man, driving west through the night traffic."
— from Brazyl, p. 179
![thedailywhat:
Flow Chart of the Day: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” — Mark Twain.
[via.]
Throwing in some market research as well.](http://13.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_krmirk3FUo1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Flow Chart of the Day: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” — Mark Twain.
[via.]
Throwing in some market research as well.
"Interestingly, a good novel likewise pulls me from myself. But it does so in a completely different way. A good novel brings me up against, or into, a fully imagined otherness. A single—transitive—otherness. I read about Prince Andrei dying on the battlefield and I am sharpened inside myself. I am given a single measure of experience and I hold it alongside mine, and when I mark the page and close the covers I am as full of singular existing as I have ever been. I have not found that, even a hint of it, in my online reading. I think it’s because the one reading encounter directs me into myself, the other sends me outward in widening spirals. Which is not always unpleasant—it’s just not gratifying from the point of view of these ultimates I invoke for myself."
— Sven Birkerts, online vs offline reading experiences.
Objectum sexuality is a pronounced emotional desire towards particular inanimate objects. Those individuals with this expressed preference may feel strong feelings of arousal, attraction, love, and commitment to certain items or structures of their fixation. For some, sexual or even close emotional relationships with humans are incomprehensible. The term objectum-sexuality was coined in the 1970s by a woman named Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer from Liden, Sweden, who was married to the Berlin Wall. (via @tvsexdeath)
Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer
"In the Taylorized world, something has been lost and, until it’s found, adding a few case studies to the curriculum at Harvard Business School probably isn’t enough. Neither unions nor businesses have lived up to Brandeis’s optimism. “If the fruits of Scientific Management are directed into the proper channels,” he wrote, “the workingman will get not only a fair share, but a very large share, of the industrial profits arising from improved industry.” Lately, that share has been going to shareholders and C.E.O.s. Home and work, separated since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, have been growing back together again: BlackBerry on the nightstand, toaster in the photocopy room. Efficiency was meant to lead to a shorter workday, but, in the final two decades of the twentieth century, the average American added a hundred and sixty-four hours of work in the course of a year; that’s a whole extra month’s time, but not, typically, a month’s worth of either happiness minutes or civic participation. Eating dinner standing up while nursing a baby, making a phone call to the office, and supervising a third grader’s homework is not, I don’t think, the hope of democracy."
My ficitional colleague this evening. Running for 3rd time straight while working, good company.
tedr:
This is according to a post on the Iranian Students Solidarity (Farsi) blog. My sources indicate the information comes from a group of resisters who have infiltrated the administration and are leaking out important information. These sources say that Yahoo representatives met with Iranian Internet authorities after Google and Yahoo were shut down during the protests and agreed to provide the names of Yahoo subscribers who also have blogs in exchange for the government lifting the blocks on Yahoo.If this is true, Yahoo is ensuring human beings die in exchange for ad sales. Uh, great.
Often insomnia would strike in, and I would ask aloud, to the darkness of the room, “will anyone appreciate this”? (My girlfriend had by that time developed the habit of using earplugs). And then in a spectacle of light rays and stars, the Fairy of Reason would appear to me and speak tenderly: “good hearted child, if you love it, some people, who have things in common with you, will too”. And then, on my knees, holding my hands together, tears shaking on the corners of my begging eyes, I would ask, “what if I’m just a freak and no one is like me?” And then she’d say, in her soothing voice: “Well, it’s true that you do some weird shit. Do you always have to do the dishes with gloves on?” And then I’d reply: “I don’t like detergent, my hands get all dehydrated and”. But the Fairy of Reason would not wait for me to finish: “Do you really need four duvets, in springtime?” And me: “Look, I get chilly when I sleep. Can we get back to my game?” And then, just as she appeared, in a beautiful glow of white color, she was gone.
(via Snarkmarket)
rap represented in mathematical charts and graphs
And this one.
And this one.
And so on…immensely fun.
