HOLD ON

Wait, but I thought a trillion was big..

Huh. This kinda makes you turn your head on its side in readjusting your perceptions...

From the homepage of Andrew Badr:

Google just announced that the number of unique URLs on the web has reached one trillion. I am proud to announce the second trillion.

btdubs, this is from the same guy that brought us yourworldoftext.  Seems he has a pattern of making things that are outside the normal web fare.

Update: Waak Waak Waak

Currently in the main domain of www.yourworldoftext.com/

(see previously posted explanation)

Sometimes I actually love my generation

Within days:

And the images are just the start of the fun.  The creativity of the bored masses is truly multi-media.  Click read more to see them, cause it all just won't fit before the jump.

The Troll King Himself

Kanye West re-defines trolling.

Literally.  I have to revise my definition of trolling now.  Mr. West's inspired performance pointed out what should've been an obvious mistake I made, which was to say trolling is "Misrepresenting oneself in an offensive or disruptive way for the purpose of comedy."  Kanye's verbal diarrhea wasn't disingenuous.  He actually meant what he was saying.  And he wasn't just doing it for the lulz.  This troll feeds on drama, not comedy.

Really, I might need to have two definitions.  Unfortunately Kanye is probably the most common type of troll, defined by "causing offense or disruption for the purposes of drama."  The other case is what I was talking about before, when people are consciously acting stupid because they think it's funny.

New Google privacy measure: Google Opt-Out Village

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

The smallest number with no Google results

is 155253458373 as of this moment.

After this moment, either
a) Google will index this page, making this page itself a result for 155253458373 or
b) Am I joking? Google doesn't crawl my page.
In the first case, I'll find out if/when Google visits my page.  In the second case, this post will remain valid.  Win-win?

Here's the actual explanation for this seemingly pointless post: an interestingly recursive question posed by Google Blogoscoped:

"What is the smallest natural number which when Googled produces no results?"

(click on the comments to see how complicated and layered the question can get)
And then this guy used the question specifically to check out Google crawling his blog.













see also: Recursion

Trolling

Crossposted at Wiktionary.com
See, it's funny, cause that makes it seem like there's serious business goin on, cause this is a Real Blog.

So I'm pretty intrigued by the idea of a troll as a new name for a sub-genre of comedy not tied to the internet. As in, yes, it's very related to the internet but I don't think the internet is integral to its definition. Think of someone who shows up in the crowd at a protest with a "We have no idea what we're talking about" sign. I think even streaking is in the same spirit.

I tried to come up with a definition that doesn't mention posting it online as being requisite:

"Misrepresenting oneself in an offensive or disruptive way for the purpose of comedy. The audience for the comedy consists of the "comedian" himself and those in the disrupted community who understand the humor."

Your World Of Text

As the creator tells it in his about page, yourworldoftext.com "is an infinite grid of text editable by any visitor. " It's more than just multiplayer notepad. It starts as a field of white spaces, and you can start adding text to any spot you wish. And you see everyone's changes in real time.

So how is this cool? Well, it's basically turned into a big graffiti'd bathroom wall. It's totally anonymous, there's no restrictions on what you can say, and you can write over anything written by anyone else. Of course it's better than a bathroom wall, since it's infinite and real time. So you'll see some people having conversations with each other, and other people making ASCII art or redrawing others' ASCII art. It becomes its own little ecosystem.

Truth be told, a lot if it is pretty lowest-common-denominator. But if you find graffiti interesting anthropologically, it can be fascinating to peruse. Also, since there are many different "worlds" depending on what you put after "www.yourworldoftext.com/" in the url you can find more interesting areas. This is one of the better ones I've found.

Yeah, I made a blog

I figure, why not? It's about time. I've been an avid follower of folks who incrementally publish content for years, so wouldn't it be interesting to see what it's like on the other side? Now what to fill a blog with...

Hey, here's a topic I always have something to say about: cool stuff I found on the interwebs. So why don't I start it there?

Not that I'm comitting to keeping this updated. Or entertaining. Or a worthwhile place to spend time in any way. I think I'll be using this as an outlet for any impulses of "well, if I were writing blog posts, how would I do it?" and also "hey here's this thing I found!"

Oh, and about the title. I wanted something short, memorable, and reasonably easy to spell. snRNPs stands for small nuclear ribonucleoproteins, which is only important because biologists nicknamed them "snurps." Sometimes I'm really impressed by actual terms that biologists made up that sound ridiculous but have become real scientific words. This is the best example of why.