Snowfall in Kinshasa

Where is the setting on my web browser that broadcasts the following:

• I’m not stupid enough to think that I’m the one millionth visitor and I’ve won a prize.
• I wont fall for you telling me I have an email at a website I’ve never been to or registered at before.
• Using my IP address to display a city nearby doesn’t increase my gullibility.
• Duplicating the user interface of a Windows XP window or an instant messaging window might trick a three year old, but not me.
• I know that the beautiful models in your stock photos have much better things to do than talk to fat losers on your dating website.

People wouldn’t waste their time with making these if there weren’t idiots that still click them. But I am not one of those idiots, so it insults my intelligence to see ads like this.

On an unrelated note, the sidebar links have fallen into neglect and may soon be axed. So it goes.

In this TED Talk by Seth Godin, the basic human motive is explained as a frustration with the status quo and the subsequent desire to change it. This must hold some truth, because it’s the reason behind my new project.

As websites have become ever more easy to create, businesses have devised more ways to let people avoid the ivory towers of web designers. Enter templates. After a few years of these greasy profit-obsessed websites cranking out thousands of flashy, hard to edit templates for a dime a dozen, the word template rings with negative connotations.

I would argue though, that the real problem with templates isn’t their aesthetic quality or background code. It’s the fact that they get passed around and re-used hundreds of times. No business in their right mind would want a logo or identity that was identical to a competitor. Yet Templatemonster, Dreamtemplate and others want you to pay them to do just that with your website. Oh, but wait.

You want to have your own website? A ‘unique’ template? They offer those too, at a 4000% markup. Consider this: no templates on templatemonster have more than about 11 downloads. That means a template that never gets purchased as ‘unique’ will pull in about $770. The unique price? $2600. So clearly this isn’t the case of them compensating, it’s a pure cash grab. What’s worse is that the unique price remains no matter how many downloads a template has. Even if 100 people have downloaded it and have the exact same template, it costs $2600 to see it removed from the site.

Naturally, I wanted to change this. And I’m launching Remotely Original with a few colleagues. No ridiculous pricing, no sleaziness, no focus on profits. Every template is unique. When someone buys one it is automatically deleted. Simple. At the prices we offer, people have said we’re going to operate at a loss. A loss of what? It costs no money to produce a template, only time.

So to hell with the status quo. Let’s see how this goes.

So, there’s a recession going on. People are unemployed and therefore, bored. Slacking around on the internet with nothing good to do (“I’m actually job hunting, honey!” etc.). However, there seems to be a palpable feeling of hope and optimism still surrounding the election of Barack Obama. This will become relevant in a second.

There’s also a lot of conflict going on, as usual. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea launching missiles, and various smaller culture-based conflicts. Of course, conflict between two groups of people is natural; it’s even inevitable. In 1954 the social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 11 and 12 year old boys on a camping trip to study group behavior. By separating the boys into two distinct teams, conflict immediately arose and escalated into cheating, fights and even arson.

Sherif and his colleagues then tried to reconcile the two groups. Almost nothing worked. The only success came by creating situations (eg. a broken water supply) that forced the boys to cooperate and work towards a common goal.

Taking these two things together, it seems prime time to me to kill two birds with one good idea. We, as humanity, need a common goal. Something to work towards. Obviously it should be something beneficial that solves a problem. But it needs to be more than that. We need something that every individual, no matter how skilled or how intelligent, can contribute to. An Apollo project for the layman. Have a few hours free on the weekend? Spend it working on the project.

Government bureaucracies and talking heads would be useful for monetary support, but the real action should take place at the individual level. The vast social networking capabilities of the internet have proven more than capable of organizing such an effort. So what are we waiting for?

The idea, initiative, and some leadership. Seems easy enough.

People who deny The Holocaust are held in roughly the same regard as the people who carried out The Holocaust. How can they flat out not believe something in the face of so much evidence? Eyewitness reports, pictures, journals, and so on. We are left to conclude that they are delusional or wicked people.

But then, I wonder, how many of the people who criticize Holocaust deniers are guilty of a similar offense? That is, how many of these people are creationists? Seemingly normal people who haven’t grown out of the belief that the world is 6 000 years old, that dinosaurs and man co-existed, that geological features can be explained by the great flood. In my mind, they are just as ignorant as Holocaust deniers, and perhaps more so. Every fossil in every museum and every molecule of protein in every animal lay foundation to the mountain of evidence supporting evolution. It is not a theory; It is as true as light and rain. The evidence is overwhelming.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof to back them up. Yet, creationists fail to adhere to the basic logic behind the burden of proof. One can not continually question the evidence of another party without offering their own to support their position. Of course, they do this anyway, using the same tired arguments that have been shot down time and time again. There are no transitional forms. Yes there are, let me show you them. There are no transitional forms. How can you argue with these people? They seem to pride themselves in their ignorance.

So, what regard are creationists held in in modern culture? A perfectly normal one, unfortunately. Even rational people are quick to shelter their mistaken beliefs, as if it is merely a matter of opinion. It isn’t. We must stop respecting and coddling creationists while holding witch hunts for Holocaust deniers. Stop with the hypocrisy.

I’ve always been fascinated with natural disasters, and have often pondered where the safest place in the world is. So, I decided to find out. Somebody more dedicated than me might have time to do the whole world, but alas, I only did Canada.

Scope

Data isn’t exactly plentiful or perfect, so I used these six natural factors to determine the safe zone:

• Earthquakes
• Floods
• Hail
• Tornadoes
• Volcanoes
• Grizzly Bears

Technically hurricanes and typhoons could be an issue, but coastlines aren’t going to be safe at all anyways. Cougar and polar bear attacks are relatively rare and weren’t included either.

The Method

I found a bunch of useful natural hazard maps on the Canadian public safety website. For example, the following is the hazard map for earthquakes.

Already most of the west and east coasts are eliminated, along with various swaths of the northern territories.

Using Photoshop, I layered the various maps and tried to line them up as well as possible. Then I set the blend modes to multiply to produce a combined map of hazards, where the lightest areas are the safest.

The safest area seems to be in the northern parts of alberta, saskatchewan and manitoba, as well as western ontario and parts of the territories. It may seem like the white areas up north are safer, but those are a result of no data on the maps. Besides, it’s far too cold up there. After adding in the grizzly bear habitat, the result is the following green zone:

Coincidently this may also be the loneliest area of the country. But it sure is safe.

But only sometimes. When you make a milkshake, you mix milk and ice cream in a blender. Do the proportions matter? Not really. Does it matter what else you add to it? Nope. Chocolate chips, oreos, caramel, guava, mint extract, white truffle butter, hot sauce, beer, leftover sweet and sour pork that probably isn’t good anymore but it would be wasteful to throw it out. Doesn’t matter.

On the other hand, beat your egg whites for two seconds too long, and your souffle will collapse faster than the Dow Jones.

The point here is that some things in life are like a milkshake, and others like a souffle. You can get by most of the time by not sweating the details and just winging it. Spending hours on end will only result in a marginally better result. On the other hand, some things require meticulous detail and caring. The key is to know which one applies, and when.

There’s a special place in buzzword hell for Search Engine Optimization. Decent people are shelling out thousands to have hand-waving ‘SEO gurus’ magically move their websites up on the Google rankings. I think it’s bullshit. All of it.

You don’t need it in the first place

Businesses and individuals who break down and pay for SEO services are lazy, stupid, or both. If your business model actually depends on people coming to your website by typing in random words on Google, then your model is seriously flawed. Stop pretending that nobody is buying your product because your page rank is too low. Your product sucks.

Yes, you want people to be able to find your website if they know what they’re looking for. But if you and your web designer have half a brain between you, that really shouldn’t be a problem.

The Google algorithm isn’t moronic. It will find your website, even if you do nothing. Paying someone to submit your website to all the search engines is like paying someone to tell the paper boy where your new house is. Do it yourself.

You’re admitting that you suck

By paying for SEO, you’re saying that you’re too incompetent to actually market the website yourself. The service/product isn’t good enough that people would want to link to it, so you’re going to pay for link farms and illegitimate backlinks. Who are you to say that search engines are wrong; That your website actually deserves to rank higher? It reeks of arrogance, or perhaps that’s the link farms I’m smelling.

Also, you’re lining the pockets of some sleazy marketing type who’s laughing all the way to the bank at your stupidity. It sounds something like this.

“Haha, some loser just paid me $4000 for ‘SEO’. What a chump.”

“What did you actually do?”

“Changed his title tag and fed him some bullshit about synergy.”

“True, true. Let’s go buy some hookers.”

Do it yourself

Step 1: Cut a hole in the box. No, wait, wrong instructions. But seriously, make your title tag less than 10 words long and include your key phrase. Put your key phrase in the meta description and keywords. Put it in your body text twice per page. Get people to link to your site with that key phrase. There, I just saved you thousands of dollars. You’re welcome.

The following is a list of things offered in exchange for web design services (found on job boards). I kid you not:

• Hair Cuts
• Acupuncture
• Massage
• Spiritual Readings
• Nutrition Session
• Career Counseling
• Limo Rental
• Salsa Dance Lessons
• A Bedroom
• Motorcycle Repair Work
• Sexual Favours
• A Gourmet Vegan Dinner

A favourite habit of our kind is to dig up predictions from the past, which generally fall into two categories. Ninety-nine percent are dead wrong, and we have a good laugh about how the predictor must have been smoking too much ganja. The remaining one percent of them are actually the product of smoking too much ganja and remarkably turned out correct.

With that said, here are my predictions for 2013:

We will make it to 2013 Even though I’ll be first in line for the 2012 movie next summer, the apocalypse isn’t going to happen. How about this time we block off the cave entrances so the asshats hiding in them can’t rejoin society.

The Windows to OS X ratio will be reversed If you want proof of this, walk into any lecture hall in North America. Also, because the smartest engineers at Microsoft don’t understand what a leap year is, watch out on December 21, 2012.

Creating synthetic organisms will be like coding PHP This technology is already emerging and has millions of practical applications. Want a lucrative future career? Here it is. Also, think of every movie featuring some engineered virus that turns everyone into raging zombies except one group of miraculous survivors who run around getting their heads ripped off until they accidently discover the zombies’ weakness which is something really lame like diet root beer. Here it is.

World hunger will be solved This is one of the easier global problems to solve. It could be done through this or this. It’s made of people…

Social networks will merge All linked through something like OpenID and integrated with your cellphone, becoming omnipresent, and quite possibly omnipotent.

Too many books will be published When everyone realizes you can get rich from writing shitty fan fiction about pubescent girls having sex with -insert mythical creature other than vampires they’ve already been covered-.

Emo/goth/punk kids will be replaced By kids who instead show no emotions and sit around wearing black with…never mind.