Science Addiction

A dormant blog by Devanshu Mehta

Month: December, 2005

Cellular Phones at the Movies

I just put up rant on “WideScreen Glory”:http://www.widescreenglory.com about the ridiculous push by theatre owners to “jam cell phones in movie theatres”:http://www.widescreenglory.com/2005/12/21/jamming-cell-phone-signals-at-the-movies/. From “that article”:http://www.widescreenglory.com/2005/12/21/jamming-cell-phone-signals-at-the-movies/

The annoying, distracting, place-reserved-in-hell, cell phone users are not the cause (of the movie industry slump); they are a nail in the coffin. […] In the past, the government tried to ban cell phones on airplanes based on the loosely defined threat of terrorists with phones. As with that case, the benefit of allowing decent people to keep their cell phones at their discretion far outweighs the annoyances of movie cell phone users.

After the Slashdot Effect

On Sunday, the 18th of December this website was the victim of “the slashdot effect”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect. That is, we were slashdotted.

slashdotted
Function: Verb
Etymology: Post-modern geekspeak
1 a: to kill a web server through excessive traffic, usually caused by a link from “slashdot.org”:http://slashdot.org
Usage: “Science Addiction”:http://www.scienceaddiction.com was slashdotted on Sunday because I submitted my “article on open source charity for the holiday season”:http://www.scienceaddiction.com/2005/12/18/seasons-givings/.

Here are a few stats from the aftermath:

Interesting stuff, to say the least. I will put more facts up as I come up with them!

UPDATE (12/22/05): A few more facts…

  • A vast majority of the slashdotters use “Mozilla Firefox”:http://spreadfirefox.com/community/?q=affiliates&id=76836&t=1. Many use Apple with Safari, and finally, a few poor souls actually use MSIE, though I would like to believe they are online from their place of work and have no choice. If so, please switch jobs quick!
  • Many Linux users… no surprises there. Many of those were “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ linux users; seems like Ubuntu is popular with the slashdot crowd.

Season’s Givings

Many people around the world plan their charitable giving around this time of the year, for religious, tax or other similarly benevolent reasons. As a geek who spends an inordinate amount of time with around his computer, these are the entities that have made my life easier in the past year and deserve all the recognition, money and general fulfillment of all Amazon Wish List desires: Read the rest of this entry »

Why ‘The Beatles’ Matter

“Steve Audio”:http://steveaudio.blogspot.com/2005/12/if-theres-anything-that-you-want-if.html has a great article on why The Beatles matter and how they changed everything. It should be required reading for anyone who appreciates modern pop, rock… or anything that came out of a studio in the last 50 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Flickr: Finally

The internet is adding language to our collective vocabularies faster than any other ‘”invention”:http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/ ‘. Here’s a prediction (if you haven’t heard enough of those):

In the “future”:http://rinkworks.com/said/predictions.shtml, flickr’ed will be part of you vocabulary.

Yep- you will be googling blogs with flickr’ed albums and nobody from the last century will have a clue what you just did. Maybe people will “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us you too. And hopefully, “AJAX-ing the CMS”:http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/421 will be out of date. Read the rest of this entry »