Gorey and The Recently Deflowered Girl

I chanced upon this book scan of The Recently Deflowered Girl. At first glance, it looks like your ordinary etiquette book, albeit of a weird topic. But it isn't so. Consider this, for example:

You meet an old bachelor friend of your family who has known you since birth. He takes you to his apartment promising to show you old tintypes of your parents. After deflowerment, you ask to see the pictures. He says, "There are no pictures, but your parents are in the next room."

You say: "Golly, I love surprises."

Obviously, this should not be taken seriously; the pieces of advice tongue-in-cheek, all. This shouldn't come as a surprise if you had known beforehand that it was authored by Edward Gorey, an author known for macabre literature/illustrations. Check out the book, worth a look.

If you want to see more of Gorey's works, check this out.

Photo: aussiegall, Flickr, Creative Commons

Crowdsourcing 101

Suppose Jimmy Wales decides to create an encyclopedia all by his lonesome self. Sounds hard, if not impossible, right?

Well, this Jimmy Wales is the creator of Wikipedia. He did not do an online encyclopedia on his own. In fact, he asked everyone who can access the Wikipedia website to contribute and collaborate on the content of the site. The result: over 10 million articles written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. I have edited some Wikipedia articles in the past myself - although my contribution is limited to correcting typographical errors - just so I can say that I have made some contribution to Wikipedia.

 

Wikipedia typifies crowdsourcing. Coined in 2006, the term crowdsourcing is defined in Wikipedia as:

[T]he act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism.

Other well-known crowdsourcing sites are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Flickr. But the concept of crowdsourcing is not new. According to Wikipedia (where else?), in the 19th century, the Oxford English Dictionary was written from volunteer contributions of millions of slips of paper. In the early days of the internet, the concept was already being applied by computer programmers and scientists.

The Emperor's Virtual Clothes author Dinty Moore forayed into the (then) mysterious world of internet back in 1995. Thirteen years ago, you had to make do with Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) for social networking. Search was not made through Google. Netscape was still the number one browser. A picture file would take minutes to download.

But even during the "primitive" era of the internet, the idea of crowdsourcing was already alive. BITNET, CSNET and Usenet allowed for discussion of computers, computing issues, scientific disciplines and controversy. Usenet, in particular, was famous in universities, research labs or other academic institutions. Usenet originated with a link between two universities, and the exchange of ideas and information is what such institutions are all about. It created huge amounts of information that would have been hard to obtain had there been no Usenet. Collaboration  and exchange of information among early Usenet users made it possible.

According to wiseGEEK, it seems that the potential of crowdsourcing has yet to be tapped. "There is an enormous creative and technical population in the world, many of whom have interesting ideas or skills, and crowdsourcing allows companies to profit from their work — often giving them a healthy living in return — at a fraction of the cost of a more traditional business model."

For more information about crowdsourcing sites, you can visit crowdsourcinglinks.com.

Comic strip: xkcd

Spot the Spammer

Lately, my email has been flooded with spam. It is mighty irritating, to say the least. 

To top it off, I almost became a victim of phishing.

There was this one email purporting to be from PayPal. It said that I purchased something via my PayPal account. I'm pretty sure that I haven't bought anything through PayPal for the last 6 months, so I was about to go to the PayPal website (rule of thumb: I never click on any link in any email, except if the email comes from very close friends or if it's an activation code) to check it out. Then I suddenly realized that I wasn't using that particular email for my PayPal account. 

So how do we avoid spam mails? If Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail can't solve the spam problem, we sure as hell can't.

But we can settle for the next best thing. mikealao has a great tip for Gmail users: 

It is absolutely impossible for us to find out who sold our email address to those spammers who choke our inbox with unwanted emails. But now there is a solution to find out people who sell our confidential information to others. Gmail provides a not so explicit feature which you can use to find out which website is giving out your email address to spammers. This will not work for the previous websites where you have already registered but you can use it for future registrations.

 Here is how to use it:

1. While signing up for any new website enter your Gmail address as your_user_name+website_name@gmail.com.

 2. Don’t worry, you will receive the mails as usual because Gmail doesn’t recognize any combination of words or numbers after the “+” sign.

 3. Whenever you get any spam message just click on the “Show Details” link to expand the email header and find out the email address to which it was sent. The images below show a test which I did with a “+” sign on my email address.

 4. If you had signed up according to the step number 1, you will be able to find out who gave your email address to the spammer.

Use this to find out which websites are selling your email addresses, check out their privacy policy and sue them if they lied. If you found this useful, don’t forget to share it with others.

I don't know if there is a similar code for other email providers, though.


Photo: Michal Zacharzewski, SXC

Photos for Your Website

Blog posts and websites without photos sometimes look drab. I admit, there are times when I don't even read the whole post. I just look at the pictures.

That is why blogs and sites which have photos usually have an edge over those that only have text in them.

But what if you suck at taking pictures? Or if your pictures aren't appropriate for your particular post? Or if you don't have a camera at all?

No problem. There are thousands of photos over the web.

However, you can't just copy a picture from a website and simply put it in yours.You'd have to contend with copyright infringement and royalties. In a worst case scennario, you can even be subjected to civil or criminal sanctions.

Good thing there are websites that offer free use of photos at no charge.

My favorite is Flickr Creative Commons.

Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.

 It has a huge collection of great pics, that is why I go to this site very often if I need a picture for my blogs.

Another website that I usually use for my pic needs is Photobucket. Its terms of service provide:

By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Photobucket Services, you hereby grant to Photobucket and other users a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content marked "private" will not be distributed outside the Photobucket Services. Photobucket and/or other Users may copy, print or display publicly available Content outside of the Photobucket Services, including without limitation, via the Site or third party websites or applications (for example, services allowing Users to order prints of Content or t-shirts and similar items containing Content).

In short, the publisher of the photo has virtually relinquished his copyright. So anyone can use it for whatever purpose. But I tend to be wary of using Photobucket pics because some photos are obviously taken  from other sites as  well (presumably without permission).

My third favorite source is openphoto.net. It has a collection of amazing pics, but the selection is limited. Here is a sample.

Another one is Stock.XCHNG. It claims to be the leading FREE stock photo site. However, you must sign up in order to use the photos in the site. But the sign up is worth it. 

Just a quick note: When using photos from the sites I've mentioned, please take note of the terms for their usage. It's only but proper. And hey, you're using their photos in the first place.

What Happens to Swallowed Chewing Gum?

This question has been nagging mer for a very long time now. Obviously, I've had my share of swallowed gums (mostly because I had to avoid getting caught by my teachers).

The usual answers (e.g. it will stay in your stomach forever) are not acceptable to me, for obvious reasons.

I had time to search for the answer over the web, and the most satisfactory answer is by Mayo Clinic:

Although chewing gum is designed to be chewed and not swallowed, it isn't harmful if swallowed. An old wives' tale suggests that swallowed gum sits in your stomach for seven years before it can be digested. But this isn't true. If you swallow gum, it's true that your body can't digest it. But the gum doesn't sit in your stomach. It progresses relatively intact through your digestive system and is excreted in your stool.

In other words, you just poop it out. However, the explanation offered by Thunder Dragon may also be another plausible explanation. Here is the illustration:

Mosquito Hearing

Heard about mosquito ringtones? Free2surf.org says:

In medical science there is a condition called “presbycusis”, when most adults over the age of 24 lose the ability to hear high frequency sounds like the mosquito sounds. Some people know this fact and creating a mosquito ringtone so high schoolers and college students are able to receive cell phone calls and text messages even at the classroom.

Which means that a person loses the ability to hear high frequencies as he gets older. Therefore, a mosquito ringtone can be heard by the (young) student but not by the (old) teacher. But beware, I read that a story about a young teacher who reprimanded a student because the teacher, in her mid-twenties, heard the student's mosquito ringtone loud and clear. Needless to say, it was straight to detention for the student.

The technology is even used as an anti-vandal system to deter teens who like to hang out at malls.

I tried this out with my mom. When I played the mosquito ringtone, and she couldn't hear a thing. She thought I was pulling her leg. Only when she listened closely that she heard the high-frequency sound. Try it out for yourself.

You Have Super Hearing!!

You have great hearing and you are probably pretty young, rock on! The highest frequency you can hear is: 18khz

Try the The Mosquito Ringtone and see how well you can hear

Photo: tanakawho, Flickr,Creative Commons

Mind block! Now what?

Sometimes, you desperately want to write about something but you simply just can't. It happens to the best of them. So what to do next?

Maybe Lorem Ipsum will do the trick. Generate a string of words and hope to the gods that someone doesn't notice that it's in Latin.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Donec auctor ullamcorper lorem. Etiam gravida vulputate lacus. Nam ultricies tempus ipsum. Quisque ullamcorper viverra libero. Cras sodales metus non sapien. Ut aliquam, felis id sollicitudin fermentum, metus augue scelerisque lectus, vitae ultricies arcu urna sed metus. Ut egestas. Donec eget tellus. Sed non elit ac pede adipiscing interdum. Etiam at erat eget erat pharetra vestibulum.

Generated 1 paragraph, 64 words, 447 bytes of Lorem Ipsum