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Why The Nose is a site full of images and videos of people wearing red clown noses. In answer to the obvious (and titular) question:
Whythenose.com is dedicated to the act of wearing a clown nose, in order to make people smile.
It’s really that simple. In a world filled with distractions and distrust, you’d be amazed at how many people (of all ages) have lost a sense of innocence. Or maybe you wouldn’t…
Wearing a clown nose is fun, it’s childlike, it’s easy and it’s free (if you already have the nose)
You can enjoy the images, send it to someone who needs a smile, or submit your own pictures. Link -via Metafiilter
Marquita Arguello and her boyfriend Tyrel Hartman are frequent users of StumbleUpon, so when Hartman decided to pop the question, he wanted to do so using that web utility. He contacted the StumbleUpon Support Team, who agreed to rig Arguello’s account to recommend a certain site at a certain time. When she logged in, she saw a Tumblr blog with eleven photos showing Hartman’s proposal written on a whiteboard.
Link and News Story -via Urlesque
If
you find Facebook's facial recognition and photo tagging kind of creepy,
the police may find it downright dangerous.
Mike Keelty, a former Australian Federal Police commissioner, said that Facebook may make undercover policing "impossible" in the future:
“The thinking we had with this result means that the 16-year-olds of today who might become officers in the future have already been exposed.
"It’s too late [for them to take it down] because once it’s uploaded, it’s there forever.”
Of the people surveyed, 85 per cent had their photos uploaded on to the internet by another person.
Keelty said that until recently this has been a real problem because Facebook refused to remove photographs, but because of competition from Google+ it had started to remove photos at people’s request.
Alarmingly, 42 percent of respondents said it would be possible to identify their relationship with other people, including family and friends.
"If you have someone in the service who is trying to remain anonymous for whatever reason, it is still possible through other relationships to find them," Keelty said.
Link - via Schneier on Security
The image above is from the undisputed best movie of the century, Undercover Brother.
Forget Justin Timberlake! You know who can "bring sexy back" to Myspace*? According to this clever webcomic by Matt Melvin of Cyanide and Happiness, it's social media hipsters.
After all, bell bottoms came back, so why not vintage social networking?
*Yes, folks - they're previously MySpace, now Myspace ... that website's not only gradually losing capital, its also losing capital letters)
Google has a neat feature that I’d never heard of before today. You can draw a distribution curve and Google will find the search term frequency that most closely resembles it. Mine ended up being “2008 sports cars.”
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You've probably heard about how Google is enforcing a "real name" only policy for Google+ social platform (dubbed "Nymwars" and ably covered by Boing Boing).
Here's what the excellent webcomic Joy of Tech think about the whole kerfuffle (Google vs the Man of Steel? Great Scott!): Link
The folks at I Can Has Cheezburger have launched a new site called Superheroes! which gathers funny stuff involving your favorite comic book heroes all in one place. See Spiderman with a baby carriage, Wolverine preparing lunch, and of course, lots about Batman. Link
It’s nice work if you can get it. Last year, Ed Casabian began moving around New York City, living in a different neighborhood every week. He writes about his experiences, and is booked up through October already.
I’d like to stay with people of different ages, races, religions, sexual orientations and economic situations. I’d like to hit the five boroughs (Staten Island eludes me but its on the calendar!). I’m trying to do 52 neighborhoods. I’m at around 40 right now depending on how you define them. Ultimately though, I’m looking for different perspectives and ideas. So far, I have stayed with some of my best friends, friends of friends, relatives of friends, former coworkers, complete strangers through some of the recent press I have received. It has been difficult, scary, interesting, and exciting. Most of all, it has been immensely rewarding, which is what I expected when this idea first popped into my head.
Casabian was granted a SoundCloud Community Fellowship to underwrite his adventures. Link -via Laughing Squid
Joseph Tame has only been an Apple product-owner for five years (since he purchased a 5th gen iPod Classic) but he’s happily professed his love of the company’s tech since. Tame claims that “[h]aving an iPhone really has changed [his] life,” and as a tribute to Steve Jobs after the recent news of his resignation, Tame used his iPhone’s Runkeeper app to record his 21km logo-shaped marathon through the streets of Tokyo. To read more about the tribute and see other works of GPS art, check out Tame’s Art of Running. Link
There are some websites that are so interesting and extensive they are known as “black holes” or “time sucks,” because once you get started, you may not be able to escape. Wikipedia is near the top of the list. Even more perilous to your workday than reading is joining Wikipedia as an editor. Before you decide to take that step, you might want to learn something about the culture of Wikipedia editing. The Awl looks at the editing history of one provocative entry:
Since 2001, the Wikipedia entry on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita has been edited 2,303 times. It’s a popular entry, too: of approximately 750,000 Wiki articles out there, it ranks at 2,075 in traffic.
In the past ten years, the entry has grown from the four-sentence description, shown above, to the detailed, 6,000-plus-word monolith of today. The two Lolita films now have their own pages, while the entry on the novel has expanded to include sections on such subjects as Lolita’s Russian translation and its literary allusions. An edit is made, on average, about every other day.
Not only is the entry constantly edited, but those edits are discussed among editors. The road to the perfect entry is long and involved, and sometimes resembles sausage making. Link -via Boing Boing
A MBA program at the University of Iowa offers a $37,000 scholarship to the person who can write the best tweet. Instead of writing two essays, applicants can write one essay and one tweet:
Applicant Seth Goldstein of Columbus, Ohio, submitted his tweet last week and said he was excited for the “fun, unique challenge.”
“It is something different and out of the box,” Goldstein said. “No other MBA schools I have applied to have anything like this.”[...]
Students are encouraged to link to their blogs, videos, Facebook accounts or anything else that may help answer the question: “What makes you an exceptional Tippie Full-time MBA candidate and future MBA hire?”
Link -via First Things | Photo by Flickr user shawncampbell used under Creative Commons license
One of my high school teachers once told our class, “if you’re going to be stupid enough to do something illegal, at least don’t be stupid enough to put it on camera.” That was before the days of Facebook and YouTube, but it seems like the best advice you can give people these days is what my teacher said, followed by “and if you’re stupid enough to put it on camera, for the love of God, don’t be stupid enough to upload it on to the internet.”
Vanessa Starr Palm and Alexander Daniel Rust certainly wish they got this advice and heeded it before they visited the Bahamas, killed an endangered lizard, ate it, documented the whole thing with photos and then uploaded the images onto Facebook.
The couple has been charged with violating an animal protection act and may also face additional charges for breaking a U.S. law that bans committing a crime in a country with a relationship to the U.S.
If you enjoy these sorts of stories, be sure to check out more funny Facebook crime stories over at Oddee.
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Here’s a law that strikes home here at Neatorama. There have been times when I’ve proofread, edited, and corrected the same thing ten times, but somehow a typo appears in the published version. I blame extraterrestrials. John Bangsund of the Victorian Society of Editors coined the term Muphry’s Law in 2003. It states:
1. if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault in what you have written;
2. if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;
3. the stronger the sentiment in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; and
4. any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent
The law also goes on to state how readers will see these errors instantly. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Flickr user Squid Ink)
If you’re a fan of the dramatic chipmunk meme, then you’ll likely enjoy this chihuahua version. If you don’t like the video, then I’m afraid I can’t be friends with you -duh duh duhnnn!
Via BuzzFeed
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Caldwell Tanner posted the 8 Lesser-Known Fairies that affect your daily life. This one, the Internet Fairy, should be very familiar to all of your Neatoramanauts! Link - via Look At This
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Mathematician Pierre de Fermat was born 410 years ago today, as we learn from the Google doodle of the day. The doodle recreates Fermat’s Last Theorem, which he left scribbled in the margin of a book.
Fermat’s claim left mathematicians puzzled for over 350 years — as mathematicians proved it true for many sets of possible values of n — until the general case was finally proved by Andrew Wiles in 1995. The story about the proof is told in Simon Singh’s book Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem.
Did Fermat really have a proof? Most likely not, since the techniques Wiles used to prove it weren’t developed until several centuries after Fermat’s death — and since, in the 30 years he lived after writing the note, he never wrote about the general case of the proof again — but nobody will ever know for sure. I’ll leave that, as they say, as an exercise for the reader.
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If you just look at the link, it won’t make much sense. But if you view the coding (listed as View Source on most browsers), you’ll see what designer Evan Roth has wrought. The webpage consists of a single sentence nested inside every HTML tag in alphabetical order. And that sentence is, appropriately “One sentence contained within every HTML tag in alphabetical order.”
Link -via Kottke | Photo by Flickr user cogdogblog used under Creative Commons license
Previously by Evan Roth: Graffiti Taxonomy
I’ve always advocated that you don’t have to be intelligent to have rights, but this idea from Defective Yeti has wondrous, if perverse, appeal. What if you had to prove that you had a grasp of basic grammar before you could log on to the internet? You’ll find a rotation of these at the site, with working buttons that will determine whether you are worthy. Link -via Rue The Day!
Lorem ipsum, the placeholder text derived from Cicero's text in Latin, is so unhip. So what's a hipster to do?
Well, here's an artisanal filler text for your website, courtesy of Hipster Ipsum (available in "Hipster with a shot of Latin" or "Hipster, neat") : Link - via kottke
When people get together and cause trouble, it’s very easy to blame the medium of communication instead of looking deeper. That’s why social networking sites get cited as the cause of so many evils. Why, don’t you know that MySpace is “worse than crack”?
Back in 2006, Ron Vietti, Senior Pastor of Valley Bible Fellowship in Bakersfield, CA, made headlines for being a vocal critic of then-popular social networking site MySpace. He argued the site — which he called both “worse than crack, cocaine or meth” and “My Waste of Space Dot Com” — was luring boys into pornography and making young girls targets of sexual predators. As David Burger reported in The Bakersfield Californian, Vietti said the site fostered bisexuality and called the Internet “the devil’s biggest scheme he has ever inserted into our lives.” He urged his congregation to go to places young people hang out (“like bars”) to convince them to delete their MySpace profiles.
I wonder what the telephone was blamed for in the 19th century. Read other stories of social-media-blaming at mental_floss. Link
Xkcd, the popular “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, recently posted a strip about the paradoxical in humans trying to create hard to guess passwords.
Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.
The comic even resulted in a Simple Strong Password Generator.
For those familiar with Anki, you may be interested in Memrise, a spaced repetition system tool that helps users memorize vocabulary in different languages. Word associations and spanned testing reminders are used to facilitate vocabulary recognition and recall. The choice of languages is huge, from Mandarin (narrated by a very sultry-sounding woman) to French and Cherokee (beta mode.)
The learning process is visualized as a plant, so that when a new word is introduced a seed is planted in both your brain and a browser-based greenhouse. To water your seedlings, your memory is tested for the meaning of the word between spaced intervals. Depending on how well you do and how often you visit, your plants may either wither or grow, eventually graduating from greenhouse to garden. Memrise’s sleek web design and enjoyable interface has got me hooked. Besides that–I hate to see my plants die.
Link
Remember Mary Bale, a.k.a. the woman who was tracked down and harassed after someone uploaded a video of her throwing a cat into a trashcan? She’s one of the many people who were taught a lesson by the throngs of angry internet users. You can read more about her and 11 others in similar situations over at Ugo. Fair warning, not all of the people actually deserved what they got.
The people I know in college always add their favorite professors on Facebook, but if they were still in high school and happened to live in Missouri, that would be completely against the law. Granted, it’s a little questionable for a teacher and minor-aged student to be friends on the internet, but do you guys think it should be illegal?
Link Via Geekosystem
It was 20 years ago today that Tim Berners-Lee (left) of CERN built the world’s first website. Here’s how Berners-Lee described the project at the time of its launch:
The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.
The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.
The web grew rapidly and transformed cultures around it. And it’s just getting started. Imagine what the web — or whatever grows out of it — will be like twenty years from now. One possibility is a concept called the Semantic Web:
The Semantic Web will see metadata, designed to be read by machines rather than humans, become a more important part of the online experience. Tim Berners-Lee coined this term, describing it as “A web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines,” – a ‘giant global graph’ of linked data which will allow apps to automatically create new meaning from all the information out there.
The future is going to be awesome.
Link -via Gizmodo | Photo by Flickr user campuspartymexico used under Creative Commons license
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I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a big fan of weird new niche blogs, which is why I love it when Miss C posts her niche blog posts over at Mental Floss. My favorite blog from this roundup is most certainly Black and WTF, which features weird and delightful black and white photos.
Spanning from over a decade ago to this summer’s memes, Ranker has gathered together 35 catchy viral musical videos that swept the internet. You can relive the good old days of “All Your Base” and “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” and also catch up with tunes you may have missed as well. Lyrics in some songs are NSFW. Link
Comments Off Here’s another contender for the title of coolest error page. The site Nosh is about food, but the video on its 404 page is about… a dead page, of course. Link -via reddit
A psychometric consulting firm named AptiQuant asked 100,000 people to take an online IQ test, and then correlated scores with the web browsers used to take them. The blue bars represent test results from 2006 and the red bars test results from 2011. The vertical axis represents IQ points. Link -via Geekologie
UPDATE: The story was a hoax. Thanks to commenter che.
Now, here’s a blog on an extremely narrow subject that many will find fascinating. Fashion It So is all about the clothing and costumes seen on the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Charlie and Anna are having a good time capturing screenshots and coming up with commentary on the fashions of the 23rd century. For example:
This episode opens up with Worf having trouble getting on his Starfleet formalwear:
You know, I think Worf probably could take a Mr. Universe pageant. And by take, I mean UTTERLY DESTROY IN THE FIELD OF BATTLE. In fact, why isn’t that part of the Mr. Universe pageant?
Link -via @JohnCFarrier
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