Ethan Zuckerman offers an innovative idea to quantify attention paid to various things on the internet. The unit of measure? The amount of attention Kim Kardashian gets in one day. As he explains:
The Kardashian mentions how much attention is paid, not how much attention is deserved, so naming the unit after someone who is famous for being famous seems appropriate. Should the unit be adopted, I would hope that future scholars will calculate Kardashians using whatever public figure is appropriate at the time for being inappropriately famous.
So how do things size up in Kardashians? Angelina Jolie gets about 0.35 Kardashians, The Kony 2012 campaign peaked at 7.7 Kardashians, but now sits at a paltry 5 centiKardashians.
As for me? Searches for this blog are registering no higher than the nanoKardashian range. And searches for my name are mostly people misspelling “Scarlett Johansson”. You gotta start somewhere!
(via Kottke)
Get it because it’s a CELL WALL
(via laugh-at-me-br0)
Chutes and Ladders (Movie Trailer)
Chutes and Ladders finally comes alive at a theater near you!
Taxali is one of my faves!
Yeah, About That Whole “Mayan Doomsday Calendar” Thing …
I think we might need to push the conspiracy theory back a few years, thanks to the discovery of a Guatemalan inscription that represents the oldest Mayan calendar found to date. How many years are the Doomsdayers off? Oh, maybe 7,000?
The ring number (a Mayan method of calculating astronomical dates, which is stunningly complex) and the lunar charts shown in the black-and-white paintings shown above point to dates almost seven millennia in the future from their A.D. 800 origin. They are accompanied by images of mayan scribes and subjects, as shown below.
That puts any Mayan future predictions a bit beyond December 2012. But we already knew that was BS, right? Yet some still need convincing. University of Texas archaeologist David Stuart had this to say about the Mayan calendar, whose repeating nature is misconstrued as predicting an apocalypse:
“The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future. Numbers we can’t even wrap our heads around.”
The Mayans kept these accurate calendars in order to coordinate religious festivals and royal events, especially to appeal to their gods for things like harvests and weather. In fact, at the time the Guatemalan paintings were made, they were locked in a deadly drought, and were perhaps charting dates for future appeals to a higher power.
Whatever the case, the idea that Mayans were concerned about the end of the world is total bunk. They were more concerned about the end of their civilization, as are many today. Says expedition leader William Saturno:
“We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It’s an entirely different mindset.”
(↬ National Geographic, photos ©Tyrone Turner and National Geographic)
A tribute to mom fashion.
So much the best.
So how did Mitt Romney lose the election? Oh, mom jeans? He wore mom jeans?
Man Arrested for Stealing Milk - While Dressed in Cow Suit
Okay, okay - I know this isn’t science related, but it’s pretty funny.
An18-year old Virginia man was arrested earlier this week after successfully managing to slip past the Walmart staff and steal 26 gallons of milk - all while dressed in a cow suit.
“This is probably one of the most unique efforts of shoplifting I’ve seen,” a spokesman for the Stafford County Sheriff told InsideNova.com.
While no one in the store did anything to stop the cow-suited culprit when he was strolling around the Walmart on all fours, he was spotted near the store handing out the stolen moo juice to passersby.
The belligerent bovine was later spotted “skipping down the sidewalk” in the cow suit by Walmart staffers.
He was later apprehended, out of his costume, at a nearby McDonald’s (perhaps he is in cahoots with the Hamburglar?). Police found the cow garb in the suspect’s car but just to make sure it wasn’t the world’s biggest coincidence, they took the teen back to Walmart where he was identified as the suspect.
The greatest crime here is that there is no surveillance footage of the theft.
