Yesterday I had an absurd text chat with a representative of GoDaddy, which hosts my SilverJacket.com website and email server. Over the years, their support has been good, but this chat was practically “Who’s on First?” At one point I wondered if I was being trolled, even though it was the day after April Fool’s Day. Here is the transcript. To save yourself the 55 minutes I spent, you can just read the blue.
It seems like if you’re posing for a portrait, there are some common-sense rules. Look at the camera lens. Don’t hold a phone in front of your face. But somehow when people use a mirror to take their own portrait, these basic rules are forgotten. I documented 100 consecutive mirror selfies on popular dating apps (Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, Hinge, The League, and Tinder), noting whether they failed and how. The main conclusion: The vast majority failed.
I realized recently while writing about blogging protocol that spell-checkers do not recognize the word unpublish. Odd, I thought at first; it's an essential part of my vocabulary. Then: Of course it's not in dictionaries! Before the Internet, unpublishing a piece of writing made about as much sense as undropping an apple. Sure, you could cease publication (Stop the presses!), but once a book or newspaper is out there, it's out there.
I learned today that the New Oxford American Dictionary named unfriend its 2009 Word of the Year. Unpublish would have served as a less gimmicky option (although maybe gimmickry is part of the criteria for selection). Unfriend in common parlance is restricted to social networking sites. Further, as a general concept, it's not novel. Friends have become enemies for millennia.
Unpublish, on the other hand, signifies one of the largest revolutions in communication since one could publish in the first place. And it's not restricted to getting back at a Facebook acquaintance who uninvited you to her killer birthday party.
Unfortunately, Web publishing may be headed toward one of the words Oxford considered and rejected: paywall. Now there's a surefire way to unfriend your readership.
[Photo morph courtesy John Gartner.]
The Internets: I read all of them.
Magical thinking–typically considered an archaic mode of cognition that populates the world with animistic forces, hidden dimensions, and evocative incantations–may actually serve us well in the future as we navigate an existence increasingly mediated by digital information.
Read the full post at Brainstorm.
But there are several cases where we’ve already jumped the gun in attributing powers to our tech toys.
Considering how lazy many e-daters are, and how clever many other e-daters are, it should come as no surprise that plagiarism runs rampant in the online dating world. On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported on copycat personal profiles, mentioning that in one survey 9% of respondents admitted to lifting material from someone else, and that lines from some sources appear on dozens of people’s profile pages. In some cases people cop to lack of imagination, but I suspect in others people subconsciously appropriate the sentiments behind the words so as to justify their claims of authorship.
Everything I need to know about the internets I learned from Gabe and Max.
After using the program advertised above, though, I still had one burning question: "Exactly how many internets are there? Which one works best with Binary?" I guess that's 10 questions.
Anywho, Gabe and Max were nice enough to provide an answer: five.
This IM chat just happened.
friend: woo hoo only 4 more days
me: YES
friend: do you have plans?
me: actually, now that i know what you’re talking about, replace that YES with a meh [definition]
friend: you do not know what i’m talking about
friend: whatever you think i’m talking about, this is more important
me: presidents day
friend: oh wow, i didn’t even realize they coincided
me: yes all the presidents coincide on that one special day
me: it makes the tides extra high
friend: even president neap?
me: is that real?
friend: since you asked…
friend: only four days
friend: until
friend: the dvd
friend: release of
friend: RENT
friend: we can watch it whenever!
me: replace my meh with a feh [definition]
friend: how do you spell that?
friend: with an "eh"?
me: yes
me: both etymologically distinct from teh [definition]
friend: indo european roots
friend: ?
me: teh has haxor rOOts
friend: you do
me: nah
For a few years there has been a recipe on the Internet that describes how to cook an egg using two mobile phones. Here it is. Basically, you place two phones on a table, place an egg between their antennae, and call one phone from the other. Assuming a power output of two watts, the egg should be cooked in three minutes. Oh, you’re also supposed to play a radio in the background at "a comfortable volume."
As far as comedy goes, this piece is pretty dry. I can see people missing the joke completely. (Especially those suspicious that cell phones cause cancer or harm chakras.) Well, it has been making the rounds again, and I was surprised this week to find that a couple of my favorite bloggers who happen to write professionally about science and technology are among those who missed the joke. (I will not name names, as they have already been shamed by their readers.)
Okay, without doing any research whatsoever, here are three easy ways to use your own common sense to debunk the hoax.
1.) If mobile phone antennae can cook an egg, why don’t you feel the slightest heat from them on your ear after using them for even an hour? You’re better off using heat from the battery.
2.) Microwave ovens have several HUNDRED watts, and THEY take several minutes to cook an egg. How could a phone cook one in the same time with two watts?
3.) Have you heard of cell phone towers? Cell phones communicate with them. Cell phones do not communicate directly with each other. That’s what walkie-talkies do. (Bonus, not as obvious: Cell phones don’t send data solely in a straight line to cell towers either. Do RAZRs have homing devices that know where the towers are and aim transmission straight to them as you bumble about? No, they emit signals in all directions.)
If you do a little Googling, you’ll find more technical reasons why the gag won’t work, but any one of the above three should be sufficient.
So before you go fiddling with the radio stations on your hifi, wondering why your egg is still cold (would smooth jazz work better?), please recognize that not everything you read on the Internets is true. And if you’re really worried about brain tumors, forget phone phobia and stay the hell away from any radio playing Beyoncé’s new single, "Check On It". That shit is toxic.
