Photoessays

Another reason I love the Internet; photographic essays of every topic, every culture, every discovery, every event. You used to have to get a copy of Time or National Geographic to see the collections of professional photographers embedded in exotic locales. Now you can GIS anything... but, even better than that, you can browse the accumulated work of some of the best photographers that journalism can send around the world. Time Magazine has thousands of collections archived on its site, some going back as far as the 1930s (or farther; I haven't gotten through all of them). The New York Times, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune have done the same, among countless others. New work is being added every day, expanding the horizons of anyone with a machine and a connection. And, of course, you don't have to stack your favorite works of photojournalism on the bookshelf anymore. :D

Here's Boston.com's "The Big Picture", one of my favorites.

Never know what meme fodder you'll find.

For The LulzSec

So,

...is boning...

...ostensibly because...

...and everybody wants to be...

 ...and also probably because...

...and all just in time to fill the gap between hockey and football. :D

Nevar Forgit

9-11-2001

I'm 17 years old walking between classes in high school, senior year, when someone yells in the halls "somebody is shooting down planes in New York, and the Pentagon got bombed!"

My next class is AP Government. The teacher is about 20 feet down the hall, standing in the doorway of his classroom. He has the TV tuned to CNN and is ushering students out of the hallway, into the room, so he can close the door. An email has been sent to all the faculty that expressly states the televisions are to remain off; he tells us this. He then tells us that he believes we are witnessing the beginning of a war, and that we have the right to see what is happening as it unfolds. We spend the rest of class watching in horror as the twin towers burn and collapse. Our teacher speculates as to the persons behind the act; he expressly mentions Osama Bin Laden. It is the first time I have ever heard this name. The CNN anchors report that all major US cities are on high alert, and all planes are being directed to land at the nearest airports. Class ends and we scatter.

The next class is marching band. With some other 300 students, I stand in formation on the practice field, and we drill for our halftime show. The school is located between one regional and one international airport, but no airplanes pass overhead today. Everyone knows why. Five minutes before we are released to head inside, a formation of 3 fighter jets passes overhead at high altitude. They are too far away to make any sound except a distant whisper; I think all 300 of us saw them anyway.

5-1-2011

My little sister, turning 19 this month, calls from college to let us know her dorm is going crazy with the news that Bin Laden is dead. She read it on Tumblr. The President is about to speak; turn on the TV. Also, she tells me, this is the day the death of Hitler was first announced publicly in 1945. I check Wikipedia: she's right.

 Fuck yeah.

The Internet Brings us Science

True, most of it is distilled down to YouTube clips and funny drawings, but it remains no less fascinating. :D

Poe K. Maun brings your Christmas Gift

I feel it beneficial to our society to announce that certain fellows and a lady or two have generously put to fine use their skills and learning in the field of emulation to provide the public with the latest iterations of the Pokemon universe, largely translated into English, and free of charge. One need only search the Internet with a reliable service, such as Google, for "Pokemon black white v7" to acquire the necessary files and instructions.  Alternately, one could enjoy this link.

Cheers!

Ja-pan.

Were it not for the Internet, we J-philes would still be watching Sailor Moon, reading translations of Ranma 1/2 released at a rate of one every 18 months, all the while wondering what life beyond "annie-may" or "man-gah" was like in the magical land of Japan.

Instead, we get a solid 60~75% of everything available in the Japanese market, translated by both commercial and charity sources (AKA fans), and sold for a reasonable price plus horrible shipping charge, straight to the US of A. Or Europe. Or nearly anywhere in the world where one can expect the Internet to be made publicly available in a cafe or library.



This is what I want for Xmas.
Maybe next Xmas, as I understand they are on backorder for the next 6 months. 

FYI: "pan" (パン）is Japanese for "bread."

Internet Justice

This is certainly one of the reasons I really, really love the Internet.

First, read this: Dying 7-Year-Old Girl Taunted by Neighbors

Summary: A little girl is dying of Huntington's disease. Her own mother also recently died from the same condition at age 24. Their neighbors are posting images of the girl and her mother in the arms of the Grim Reaper, putting their faces in place of skulls, etc. and posting the crap on Facebook. Also, they have a coffin displayed in the back of their pick-up truck (for Halloween, they claim) and have been driving it up and down the street since before the mother's death.

And because the Internet allows word of this appalling behavior to spread far beyond the bounds of Detroit, it shows up on places like FARK; meanwhile, 4chan dispenses great justice, and Reddit organizes donations and support for the victim's family.

While the denizens of the 'net might not have the power to stop death (yet), they sure as hell can put apply the power of the human response to tragedy and injustice in a way we never could before.

Oh, and somebody's helping via Twitter, too. >:D

Some words and no pictures

Dipity's timeline of memes is an incomplete but useful catalogue of Internet madness. Know Your Meme is better. Encyclopaedia Dramatica is best 4chan.

Meme Evolution

A meritorious image appears:

Someone adds text:

...and the sum of image and text, deemed of interest to those first exposed to it, becomes a meme.

Some fan of the meme adapts the text to meme classic font "Impact" with black outline added via a layer style (usually "drop shadow" or "outer glow") in Photoshop:

...and exploitation and/or hybridization of the meme begins:

...and continues ad infinitum. :D

On a Berserking PC, and Cautions

I run a Mac. My family runs a PC. They just got ripped to shreds by a pretty bad infection (infarction), and the fellows over at BleepingComputer are helping me (the de facto familial IT manager, for some reason) clean it up.

Save yourself the pain, the anxiety, the resetting of passwords and back account numbers:

Three Tips

(with Regards to Security)

for anyone who uses

Windows-whatever-version

1) Keep that firewall up, damnit! This is the 2010's, and firewalls aren't just for uptight techies and CIA agents anymore. You need one. If you don't have a firewall or don't trust the strength of the one you have, Comodo and Zone Alarm are both excellent and free of charge. Important: if you use Zone Alarm, be sure to deactivate the debugging feature, else you'll get a snowballing file called tvdebug.log that takes up space on your machine. If you use Comodo, I suggest installing only the firewall portion... there's better anti-virus freeware to be had elsewhere.

2) Don't buy McAfee. I cannot rightly speak for Norton, as I have not used it in years, but word on the forums is that neither are even half as good as some freeware out there. McAfee, besides being a subscription service (i.e. it costs money every year), is also a major culprit in slowing down the overall performance of a PC -- sloppy programming means it takes up too much of your machine's memory and processing resources. Also, it's not very good at what it's supposed to do; namely, catching bad stuff and keeping it off your computer. Case in point, the family computer that I am now trying to save from a complete flush-and-reinstall-everything scenario has had a subscription to McAfee Security Center (the full line of McAfee's anti-everything + extra firewall and privacy protection) for three years running, and it STILL has been badly screwed by a rootkit, viral rogue, and more trojans than there ever were in the historic Trojan army.

3) Be really, really careful about what you do on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. If the file size is to small (or too big) to be the thing you intend to download, don't touch it. If the file name reflects exactly the same search terms you put in to find it and nothing more, don't touch it. If you don't recognize the file type, don't touch it. And for torrent files... try to choose from torrents that are rated positively and/or have worthwhile comments on them. I trust the ratings on isoHunt.

Thanks to the the guys behind the name schrauber over on BleepingComputer.com, especially Thomas, who has been patiently giving me clear instructions to save the family machine. I owe you, seriously.

This is exactly what I mean...

...when I say, with great emphasis, "Goddamnit, I love the Internet."



How else would we get shit like this? Seriously, how? Remember School House Rock? You think they would have made this flavor of awesome, and then run it on Saturday morning between the cartoons? Would your professors have recorded it on Betamax or VHS, and rolled in a TV and a VCR to play it in class? Maybe rewind it while you all took notes, then play it again?

Hell naw. This is for loading up on the classroom master Mac and firing through the HD smartscreen, surround-sound on and captions in three languages. Then you'd get the link in your email, along with all the PDFs of notes and reading from the week, so you could review it on your laptop from the dorm, or on your Blackberry in the dining hall, or on your iPhone while you're walking to your final exam. This is Internet sweetness, my homefries.

Damn.

YAY EVERYTHING~

Happeh New Yeer. :D

The following post has been written for convenience, so that the next time somebody asks me (or you) about how to get files online, I (or you) can just link them here.

How to Get
-- for Free --
Various Media Files
such as music, movies, TV shows, books, etc.
on the Internet
(for beginners)

The absolute most fantastic thing about the Internet, in my opinion, is how it is progressively making everything available to everyone. A large portion of that everything is also gratis, in some cases illegally, but in many cases entirely within the law and endorsed by the whatever-thing's creator or copyright holder.

Here is a short rundown of how to access such things. ^_^

Torrents
Little files (a few kb) tell a little program (just a couple of MB) that you install (for free, and without spyware/adware crap) where all the little pieces of a big file (whole movies, music anthologies, sometimes 10Gb or more) are, and you download that file from many sources all at once, giving you big content in just a little time. :D

You need that little program first. The best options are:
For Mac: Transmission
For PC: µTorrent

Then you just need to find the little files (called torrent files) that point to everything. You can search for them on any regular search engine: simply search for "nameofthingthatyouwant torrent download". Alternately, you can use a dedicated torrent finder. My favorite torrent finder is isoHunt.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
Napster was this. There are still dozens (maybe hundreds) of programs that do this. It is the simplest form of live file sharing: you install a program that gives you a search function, you input search terms for what you want, and the program searches the file collections of all the other users on its network to find the file for you. The file is only available while both you and the other person are simultaneously using the P2P program, and download speeds can be slow if the person who has that file has a slow connection.

For either Mac or PC, I suggest using Frostwire. A lot of people use an older program called Limewire, but it sucks. Don't use it; it has spyware and adware and it's slow as hell.

PowerGoogle
Learn your operators, or use a file hunting script. If you've never used any special marks to enhance and refine your Google search, you will be surprised at the difference they make. You can find anything on the open Internet if you explain it to the search engine correctly.

There are other ways, but these are the simplest ones I know. Have fun, and please note that I haven't told you to do anything illegal. >w<

Old Internet

Wow. The "we call it Email" bit with a trademark? Think of how ubiquitous the word "email" has become... you don't even need the E anymore, really. o_o;

The Ten Rules

From The Telegraph, so take it with a grain of salt, per the Quex Theory: that nothing but the Internet can keep up with (and thereby correctly define) the Internet, except the Internet.

Any internet user will know that the web, like the outside world (or “meatspace”), follows certain rules. We take a look at 10, with the most well-known and widely used towards the top and some of the lesser lights lower down. If you know any more, let us know below.

Equally, of course, if you have formulated one yourself, do likewise – but you might want to include your real name, not just a web pseudonym. Otherwise it will be known forever as Gherkin555’s Law, or whatever, and you will miss your shot at posterity. We should state that we are not endorsing these laws or the views they imply, merely reporting them.

1. Godwin’s Law
The most famous of all the internet laws, formed by Mike Godwin in 1990. As originally stated, it said: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." It has now been expanded to include all web discussions.

It is closely related to the logical fallacy “reductio ad Hitlerum”, which says “Hitler (or the Nazis) liked X, so X is bad”, frequently used to denigrate vegetarians and atheists.

Common Godwin's Law appearances include describing women's rights campaigners as “feminazis”, comparing the former US President George W Bush to Hitler, or saying Barack Obama's proposed healthcare reforms are the new Holocaust.

In its broader sense it can be used to describe any situation where a poster loses all sense of proportion, for example describing New Labour as “Zanu-Labour” after Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwean political party Zanu-PF.

As well as the descriptive form, it can be used prescriptively: so if any poster does mention the Nazis in a discussion thread, Godwin’s Law can be invoked, they instantly lose the argument and the thread can be ended.

If this is done deliberately to end the argument, however, it does not apply. This codicil is known as “Quirk’s Exception”.

2. Poe’s Law
Not to be confused with the law of poetry enshrined by Edgar Allen Poe, the internet Poe’s Law states: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”

It was originally formulated by Nathan Poe in 2005 during a debate on christianforums.com about evolution, and referred to creationism rather than all fundamentalism, but has since been expanded.

Poe’s Law also has an inverse meaning, stating that non-fundamentalists will often mistake sincere expressions of fundamentalist beliefs for parody.

Examples abound – one particularly difficult-to-judge site claims that “Heliocentrism [the belief that the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the other way around] is an Atheist Doctrine”.

One that must, surely, be a parody is sexinchrist.com (WARNING: link contains adult material), a site that offers Christians advice on the rights and wrongs of such activities as threesomes and pubic shaving, among much more.

However, it is hard to be entirely certain, given the existence of christiannymphos.org (WARNING: link contains adult material), an apparently entirely serious site.

Here is an example of a parody site that embodies both Godwin's and Poe's Laws.

3. Rule 34

States: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” See also Rule 35: “If no such porn exists, it will be made.” Generally held to refer to fictional characters and cartoons, although some formulations insist there are "no exceptions" even for abstract ideas like non-Euclidean geometry, or puzzlement.

For obvious reasons it is not appropriate for lengthy discussion in a family newspaper, but the recent appearance of Marge Simpson on the cover of Playboy, pictured above, was a (very mild) example of the law in action, and going mainstream.

The spread of fanfic, slash fiction and hentai around the internet, as well as the rise of furries, are making this law more and more accurate every day.

The other 33 rules change frequently, except one and two, which are “Do not talk about /b/” and “Do NOT talk about /b/”, respectively, referring to a message board on the 4chan.org website.

4. Skitt’s Law
Expressed as "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself" or "the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster."

It is an online version of the proofreading truism Muphry’s Law, also known as Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror".

Language Log quotes the following example, from Paul Ordoveza’s How Now, Brownpau? blog:
"For too long, we linguistic pedants have cringed, watching this phrase used, misused, and abused, again, and again, and again. 'This begs the question...' [we hear], and we must brace ourselves as the ignoramii of modern society literally ask a question after the phrase."

While Mr Ordoveza’s point is entirely valid (“begging the question” is a logical fallacy, meaning to "beggar the question", or assume your conclusion in your premise – not to raise the question), the plural of ignoramus is ignoramuses.

It was apparently first stated by G Bryan Lord, referring to a user named Skitt, on Usenet in 1998.

5. Scopie’s Law
States: “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room.” First formulated by Rich Scopie on the badscience.net forum.

This law makes little sense without a background knowledge of Whale.to, a conspiracy theory site which includes such items as the complete text of the anti-Semitic hoax Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as claims that Aids is caused by vaccination programmes, and that Auschwitz never happened.

It has been expanded by posters on rationalwiki.com to include any use of Answers in Genesis in an argument about creationism and evolution.

6. Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law)
States: “If you have to insist that you've won an internet argument, you've probably lost badly.” Named after a user on the role-playing gamers’ forum RPG.net.

Danth’s Law was most famously declared in “The Lenski Affair”, between microbiologist Richard Lenski and the editor of Conservapedia.com, Andrew Schlafly, who cast doubt upon Prof Lenski’s elegant experimental demonstration of evolution.

After what is widely held to be one of the greatest and most comprehensive put-downs in scientific argument from Prof Lenski, Mr Schlafly declared himself the winner.

7. Pommer’s Law
Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”

8. DeMyer's Laws
Named for Ken DeMyer, a moderator on Conservapedia.com. There are four: the Zeroth, First, Second and Third Laws.

The Second Law states: “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.”

The Zeroth, First and Third Laws cannot be very generally applied and will be glossed over here.

9. Cohen’s Law
Proposed by Brian Cohen in 2007, states that: “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that... …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”

Has also been stated in the much longer version, "Whoever resorts to the argument that 'whoever resorts to the argument that... 'whoever resorts to the argument that... 'whoever resorts to the argument that... 'whoever resorts to the argument that ... 'whoever resorts to the argument that... ...has automatically lost the debate' ...has automatically lost the debate' ...has automatically lost the debate' ...has automatically lost the debate' ...has automatically lost the debate' has automatically lost the debate. 

10. The Law of Exclamation
First recorded in an article by Lori Robertson at FactCheck.org in 2008, this states: "The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters."

It is reminiscent of the claim in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels that the more exclamation marks someone uses in writing, the more likely they are to be mentally unbalanced.

According to Pratchett, five exclamation marks is an indicator of "someone who wears their underwear on the outside".

 The Noosphere is growing. :D