After reading a post at boingboing, I looked around at some tech-oriented companies’ websites (or at least their front pages) to see if they said anything about the tsunami disaster and various relief efforts.
As of right now, the following companies are devoting significant space to this:
Apple has removed all marketing materials, and displays only tsunami aid-related info.
Amazon has a prominent section on their front page, linking to the page where they are collecting donations for the Red Cross disaster relief fund - $3,717,880 so far.
Google has a link on their ultra-spare front page to a list of links, for information and for donations.
The following companies, in contrast, say absolutely nothing from their front pages:
I stopped looking at this point, because I’m not really all that interested in the bajillion other corporate websites out there.
I’m not implying that corporations have some kind of duty to respond, symbolically or materially, to natural disasters. I just think it’s interesting.
4 Comments
I just can’t stop posting about the crazy crap I find in my referrer logs.
It appears that someone — about 9 years old, I’m inclined to guess — went to ask.com and searched for “What’s the real word for poop”.
The current result (view by clicking the link above) has a post of Holly’s in second place. I’ll ask you to note that dooce is in fourth place here; proof, in case you needed it, that Holly totally dominates the online “poop” mindshare.
1 Comment
Happy belated holidays, and all that. I had planned to write earlier, but was distracted by the festive holiday stomach bug that we all fell prey to.
Actually, there has been something going around. At least 4 people were out of my office sick yesterday and today.
Anyway, now I’m feeling much better and can thoroughly enjoy the traditional application of this winter’s layer of blubber. ‘Tis the season to have too much food within easy reach, such as the four-pound bag of pistachios and the homemade caramels that my sister sent (thanks, Chrys!):
Mmm, not just homemade, but homemade and imported. I definitely need to start making people gifts instead of buying lame crap from stores.
Comments
Looking through my referer logs today leads me to note the following:
- the majority of the accesses to pinette.org are referred by “baby” searches on images.google.* (various countries).
- the flowerhat picture is showing up on more and more pages (found a new one with a .nl TLD today)
- Daphne is also on the front page of search results for snowsuit.
If I were some kind of crazed Machiavellian guy, then this would all be part of my secret master plan to embed Daphne deep in the public consciousness, as the first step in a lifelong marketing scheme to include starring roles on Disney children’s sitcoms, followed by manufactured pop princess status, then Hollywood superstardom, a move into directing and production, the governorship of California, and finally the presidency.
But, that sounds like a lot of work.
Comments
I mentioned recently that a picture of Daphne shows up on the first page of results when you search Google Images for the word “baby” (first noticed by Aprille).
Well, one consequence of that is that people have started using that picture for other things. That is, they’ve searched Google for the word “baby” or “baby pictures” or some such, picked Daphne’s picture from the list, and appropriated it for their own use.
This doesn’t bother me — I haven’t put up any kind of copyright restriction for the text or images on this blog. I just think it’s interesting.
A lot of people, I think, are just using the picture to illustrate the concept of “baby”.
For example, that seems to be the case for this site (auf Deutsch):
…as well as this one (in English):
On the other hand, based on a machine translation, I think whoever set up this one (in Greek) seems to be using the picture as if it were a baby pic of the person whose bio is on this page:
I don’t speak or read Farsi, and I couldn’t find an online machine translation service for it, so I have no idea what this one is about:
I’m not sure whether this one is Farsi too, or something else:
I looked these up after finding them in my referrer logs. That only lets me track people who’ve linked directly to the image on my server; I have no way of knowing whether anyone has downloaded a picture to their own server and used it there. Such is life on this crazy crazy interweb.
(Actually, when someone embeds the image in their own page by linking directly to my server, that’s often considered bandwidth theft, and there are easy ways to block most of it. But my readership of maybe 10 to 15 doesn’t come close to tapping out my monthly bandwidth allotment, so I don’t really care.)
4 Comments
I recently read an interesting article on “Intelligent Design”, the latest incarnation of “creation science”. In case you are lucky enough not to be familiar with this, it is an attempt to dress up creationism in scientific clothes — an effort supported by some people with PhD after their names, so you know it’s Real Science. :)
Creationism-in-schools is one of my pet peeves — one of those things that gets under my skin and really tweaks the nerve endings — so you can imagine how I feel about Intelligent Design proponents getting school boards to adopt their curriculum proposals. It makes me want to poke my eyes out with a stick, is what.
(One time, one of Holly’s aunts was helping us pack stuff into a truck for a move, and while explaining why she homeschooled her kids, she casually tossed off that old saw about how “evolution is just a theory, you know”. I curled my lip and said “umm, no it’s not. It’s not a theory”. While she looked briefly shocked, as if it had never occured to her that someone related to her by marriage could actually disagree with her on so fundamental a point, I bit my lip and walked off, to avoid the argument. I really needed her to keep loading the truck.)
Anyway, the genius of Intelligent Design is that it doesn’t have to explain a blessed thing. In order to keep clear of the old Supreme Court ruling prohibiting “equal time” for scripture-based creationism, ID proponents avoid mentioning scripture or the Bible at all. The core argument seems to be: lots of stuff is really complicated, and we don’t think that evolution could make things that are so gosh-darned complicated, so there must be an intelligent designer, and therefore there is no such thing as macro-evolution and speciation and etc.
The goal of ID proponents is not to provide an explanation for things like speciation, though (”who is the intelligent designer, anyway?” “uh, we dunno. Aliens, maybe. Or something”).
No, the goal is to get public schools to include anti-evolution materials in their curricula. And the most successful argument for this seems to be: hey, why should schools teach only one side of evolution? Shouldn’t they teach both sides, and let kids decide for themselves after weighing the evidence? Isn’t that more in line with the scientific process?
Which is an excellent argument, really. It’s such a good argument, in fact, that the largest Christian school in Alabama has gone and applied it to teaching about slavery. Public schools only present one point of view - the one that says slavery was bad! What a travesty! And, hey, when was the last time you heard the history of World War II from the Nazis’ perspective, huh? (Ok, I made that last sentence up. But you see where this is going; the possibilities are endless!)
So, here’s my plan starting tomorrow:
Invent crackpot theory, or adopt existing one (the Flat Earth Society is due for a renaissance, right?)
Create and fund an “institute” dedicated to promulgating my crazy theories, including pet PhDs who can howl about academic persecution.
Advance a series of arguments carefully designed to be unprovable either way; insist that they are therefore just as valid as any “scientific dogma” currently being taught.
Convince schools to teach my theories alongside the traditional science curriculum. Make millions selling flat-earth maps and trick compasses and printed teaching materials.
Retire to semi-obscurity in private castle, wear tissue boxes on feet, cackle at the moon while scrabbling against the windowpane with 10-inch fingernails.
Sound like fun to anybody else?
1 Comment
So in contrast to favorite apps of mine such as del.icio.us or Flickr, which hope to help you locate items of interest through the subterfuge of keeping track of other peoples’ efforts to manage their own stuff, iTunes takes a decidedly lo-tech approach: they hire people to sit down and listen to stuff, then write out recommendations (in the form of ad-hoc collections of buyable songs).
One of those collections (called “The Voice”) recently led me to do something I almost never do: buy online. I don’t go out of my way to buy things offline, but there are a couple of factors that conspire to keep my internet purchases down: first, I have a weird thing about holding something in my hands before I buy it - doesn’t matter if it’s a CD or book that’s going to be the same at the local store as it would be after delivery from Amazon. It’s nonrational, I know.
Secondly, the multi-step click-and-wait-and-type-and-wait process necessary for most internet purchases pretty well kills off any possibility of an impulse buy.
Anyway, “The Voice” is a collection of vocally interesting performances, and it included a clip from a song called “Sascha” by Jolie Holland. For those who might not be aware, iTunes lets you listen to a 30-second-or-so clip from each song before deciding whether you’d like to buy it.
The “Sascha” clip had me paralyzed, jaw hanging open, eyes glazed over… I may have drooled, I’m not sure. (if you do have iTunes, click here to listen to the clip.)
Holland seems to favor ultra-spare arrangements that highlight her two big assets - her quirk-o-matic sense of melody and phrasing, and her eerily perfect voice. One of the reviews (probably on her official site; I can’t find it now) described her as sounding like she was singing from beyond the grave, which is pretty apt; she really does sound unearthly.
Her official site offers a few mp3s and a streamng version of her entire first album. The sound reproduction is terrible, which I guess is the incentive to buy the real thing. :) You can also grab some higher-quality mp3s from her label site. None of them are of “Sascha”, but they’re all beautiful and gratuitously weird, which I enjoy.
That bizarro unplaceable-to-me Southern accent, the bell-clear tone, the velvet-covered-handcuff vocal control, the cynic but unpredictably sweet lyrics, the finger-picking that makes you wonder if you’ve stumbled on an old Leadbelly recording — I’m seriously twitterpated. I mean that strictly in a musical/artistic sense, although she is nerdy-hot, as you can see:
So I bought “Sascha”, of course, and wouldn’t be suprised to find myself buying more once the holiday season is over and entertainment spending stops setting off my redundancy alarms.
On the other hand, this could turn out like a couple of months ago when I briefly became fixated on Nellie McKay, after watching some live concert footage on some cable channel or another. It crashed and burned about 24 hours later when I realized that I seriously could not stand to listen to her studio album — the overproduction and the slickness and the (no other way to say it) presence of instruments somehow subtracted the wonder and spontenaety and humor of her live performance.
Of course, now that I actually take the time to look, I see that you can find mp3s of her live performances at this fan site. Hmmn. I think I may have to download those.
If you’re interested, I suggest listening to “Won’t U Please B Nice” and “I Wanna Get Married” and “Change The World” from the Aldrich Museum show. Then look at some of the other shows, and maybe play the “holy-crap-how-many-languages-does-she-speak/write/sing” game. She’s, like, 19 or something.
Okay, feeling old and boring now. Time to go to bed.
1 Comment
« Previous entries
