Posts Tagged ‘Google’
“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible”*…
There is an order to the ordered search for ordered understanding…
Science (from Latin scientia, meaning “knowledge”) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Modern science is typically divided into three major branches that consist of the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy and Earth science), which study nature in the broadest sense; the social sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, economics, history) which study people and societies; and the formal sciences (e.g. mathematics, logic, theoretical computer science), which study abstract concepts. There is disagreement, however, on the formal sciences being a science [as they use an a priori, as opposed to empirical, methodology]. Disciplines that use science, such as engineering and medicine, are described as applied sciences…
And there is a dazzling array of “branches” of the scientific endeavor:
• Acanthochronology – study of cactus spines grown in time ordered sequence
• Acarology – study of mites and ticks
• Aceology – science of remedies, or of therapeutics; iamatology
• Acology – study of medical remedies
• Acoustics – science of sound
• Actinobiology – synonymous with radiobiologyAdenology – study of glands…
Browse dozens and dozens at “Index of branches of science,” from Wikipedia… whose contributors may be erring on the generous side, as the list includes such entries as “Hamartiology” (the study of sin) and “Taxidermy” (the art of curing and stuffing animals).
* Albert Einstein
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As we tackle taxonomy, we might recall that it was on this date in 2013 that Google experienced a five-minute outage affecting all of it’s services, including Google Search, YouTube, and Google Drive. During that brief period global internet traffic dropped 40%.
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”*…
Killed by Google is the Google graveyard; a free and open source list of discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps. We aim to be a source of factual information about the history surrounding Google’s dead projects.
Contributors from around the world help compile, research, and maintain the information about dying and dead Google products. You can join the discussion on GitHub, or follow us on Twitter. A project by Cody Ogden.
206 projects, and counting– some have been supplanted by newer Google services; some, outmatched by competitors; and some… well, maybe just not such good ideas to begin with: “Killed By Google.”
* Winston Churchill
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As we obsess over obsolescence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1995 that The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chronicled the World Wide Web in its A Day in the Life of Cyberspace project.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Media Lab had invited submissions for the days leading up to October 10, 1995, on a variety of issues related to technology and the Internet, including privacy, expression, age, wealth, faith, body, place, languages, and the environment. Then on October 10, a team at MIT collected, edited, and published the contributions to “create a mosaic of life at the dawn of the digital revolution that is transforming our planet.”
“When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses”*…
This month marks the anniversary of the U.S. Business Roundtable’s 2019 call for a shift from “shareholder capitalism” toward “stakeholder capitalism.”…
Business leaders asked us to imagine a transformed world, but a bat virus in Wuhan had its own ambitious plans — and has, for the time being, transformed the world in quite another way. It has thrust government to the center, pushing business, whatever its approach to capitalism, to the sidelines.
Nobody could reasonably expect business alone to fix the pandemic. Nonetheless, some investors under the banner of “impact investing” argue that business alone will be able to fix the other big problems ailing the global economy, such as climate change or global female literacy, without sacrificing commercial returns. This view has garnered interest from major banks, consultancies, business lobby groups, and even former prime ministers. One of impact investing’s leading champions, Sir Ronald Cohen, believes that it could be the “revolution” that will save capitalism and solve many of the world’s greatest problems.
It is an enticing vision of an enlightened post-pandemic economy, and, as an impact investor and economist, we support its ambitions. However, if we really want to reform capitalism, then impact investing as it is traditionally conceived will not be enough. The pandemic is not a mere anomaly; there are profound limits to what business can do profitably in normal times too. We need to reform the rules that govern how our economy works — and impact investors have a critical role to play [in changing those rules]…
From Harvard Business Review, “Impact Investing Won’t Save Capitalism.”
* Shirley Chisholm
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As we endeavor to ensure equitable equities, we might recall that it was on this date (Friday the 13th) in 2013 that Google suffered an outage: all of its services were unavailable for five minutes, including Google Search, YouTube, and Google Drive. During that brief window, internet traffic around the world dropped by 40 per cent.
Spinning a (World Wide) Web…
click here for larger, interactive version
In commemoration of Chrome’s birthday, Google enlisted Hyperakt and Vizzuality to create a celebratory chart of the evolution of the internet… The interactive timeline has bunch of nifty features– your correspondent’s fave: clicking a browser icon allows users to see how the browser’s window has changed in each release… a stroll down “memory lay-out,” if not memory lane– and a concrete reminder of the importance of design.
[TotH to the ever-remarkable Flowing Data]
As we resolve yet again to clean out our bookmark cache, we might wish an acerbic Happy Birthday to journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and critic Henry Louis “H. L.” Mencken; he was born on this date in 1880. Mencken is the auuthor of the philological work The American Language, and is remembered for his journalism (e.g., his coverage of the Scopes Trial) and for his cultural criticism (and editorship of American Mercury— published by Alfred Knopf, also born on this date, but 12 years after Mencken ) in which he championed such writers as D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson. But “H.L.” is probably most famous for the profusion of pointed one-liners and adages that leavened his work…
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
H.L. Mencken, photograph by Carl Van Vechten (source)
Hitting ’em where they ain’t…
The folks at Really Magazine have a bone to pick with Google and it’s Page Rank Algorithm, which determines the results that a search yields:
It is of course pure folly. It works by pushing up the pages which are already popular and have lots of links to them. Although it is patented, there is and never was absolutely nothing new about it. It is just a computerized feedback version of ‘The rich get richer’ or ‘Nothing succeeds like success’ – which we all know too well.
full article
By way of remedy, Really commissioned Inframutt, which “is trained to automatically fetch and display the least popular results for any given search page.”
Try it here.
As we marvel at the ways in which democracy can seem positively random, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that the first phase of jury selection in the O.J. Simpson murder trial was completed (304 potential jurors were chosen). It was exactly one year later– on this date in 1995– that the case was sent to the jury for deliberation.
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