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Did This Man Just Rewrite Science?
Take a sheet of graph paper that has been divided into grids. Color a square in the middle of the top row black. Drop down to the next row. Now invent a rule that will decide if a square should be black or white, based on the square above it and that square’s neighbors — for example, that a square should be the same color as the one above it unless that square has a black neighbor. Go across the second row filling in squares accordingly, then repeat the process, following the same rule, for the third row, the fourth row, and so on.
There are 256 rules you can concoct to play this simple game. Most will create a boring or repetitive pattern. But at least one rule will cause the page to explode into complex, ever-shifting patterns. You will have created a so-called universal computer, equal in its computational sophistication to Apple’s jazziest laptop. Given the right starting pattern, and the right rule, according to Dr. Stephen Wolfram, a former teenage particle physicist and software entrepreneur who has been doing this at home for the last 10 years, those lines and shapes cascading downward can be made to pick out the prime numbers, compute pi, calculate your income tax, or model the evolution of a star — anything a real computer can do.
via Did This Man Just Rewrite Science? – New York Times.
Yet another thing to try in these holidays…
20 Weird Logos That Work (and Why They Do)
Logos are everywhere. Because of this, only a few can rise among the noise — and often it’s the more unique logos that are most memorable. Sometimes to be unique, you’ve also got to be weird. In this post, we showcase twenty lovably strange logos that work.
via 20 Weird Logos That Work (and Why They Do) – VECTORTUTS.
My favourite?
Seven and Six.
The geometric layout of the Seven and Six logo creates a groovy looking mark that also acts as the graphical alternative of the brand name. Using the numeric figures and the ampersand reinforce the complete worded variations.
Love the design. Wish I could be that designer-y.
Abstruse Goose » Computer Programming 101
…for some reason, Press This couldn’t “see” this image on the webpage. I had to upload it to my server.
73.4 Percent of All Wikipedia Edits Are Made By Roughly 1,400 People
There are millions of people who browse Wikipedia in any given month, but only 2 percent of them (roughly 1,400) are responsible for editing nearly 75 percent of the information on the entire website.
via College OTR: 73.4 Percent of All Wikipedia Edits Are Made By Roughly 1,400 People.
Now there’s an interesting thought for you.
However, Digg says otherwise:
First, those statistics are old, there are many more regular editors on wikipedia today. Second, the so called “2% rule” is nothing new and is present on pretty much every web2.0 site, or any sort of system that involves user contribution. 90% of users are lurkers, another 8-9% are light content generators, and about 1-2% do most of the work. It follows a standard distribution bell curve.
Furthermore, this article is being very paranoid about the statistics. A small group of people may be responsible for most of the actual writing of articles, but that other 26.6% comes in the form of minor edits, corrections, fact-checking, and adding credible references. You will be extremely hard-pressed to find articles that were only written entirely by one person.
So there!
If it’s on the internet, it must be true. 😀
Images in Press This posts?!
Well, I’ll be.
Maybe I want WordPress to be more like Tumblr, with it’s different kind of posts (videos, images, quotes, links), and all that jazz.
So anyway, in WordPress 2.7, they’ve added a QuickPress option. That covers just the text posts that tumblr offers.
The rest? What about quotes, links, music and videos?
Well, that’s where Press This comes into play. From any website, I can select some text, and hit the “Press This” bookmarklet on my bookmarks toolbar. The text that I had selected is now quoted, the title of the page between the tags of the post, and the URL of the webpage is now stuck as a “smart link”, i.e. <a href=”webpage URL”>title of webpage here</a> like so.
But until then, I haven’t been able to insert any images from blog posts, or anything. It was the one thing that really annoyed me about Press This. My first two gripes I had already dealt with – the links from Press This posts now open in a new window, and the text that I’ve selected is now stuck in <blockquote> tags.
Images had me stumped – even though the PHP file had the actual code for images, I didn’t have the faintest clue about what it did. I managed to figure out what the code for flash videos (like YouTube) did through pure experimentation, but the images? I had no idea.
Until today.
Today, I posted the story about Senator Conroy’s plan to filter the Australian Internet. I really, really, wanted to include the image from that post in my post – but I had no idea how to do that via Press This. So, I screenshotted the image using Skitch, intending to insert the image as a normal image in the post.
But, no. Press This automatically showed me a list of all the images that it could find on the page – I found the image that I wanted, clicked on it, and that was that – the image was now inserted in my post.
I <3 WordPress.