Commercial sites should just buy the blogs that help them. There are brands selling things that bloggers love talking about and bloggers who would love to make a living without Adsense. So why don’t they just get together?
What makes a diamond real?
This is from an old but interesting story from Wired.com about the New Diamond Age.
Put pure carbon under enough heat and pressure – say, 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres – and it will crystallize into the hardest material known. Those were the conditions that first forged diamonds deep in Earth’s mantle 3.3 billion years ago. Replicating that environment in a lab isn’t easy, but that hasn’t kept dreamers from trying.
Making diamonds in a lab is sure to upset the deeply entrenched diamond industry.
The mystique of natural diamonds is anything but rational. Part of the allure is their high cost and supposed rarity. Yet diamonds are plentiful – De Beers maintains vast stockpiles and tightly controls supply. Clever marketing may bring buyers around to manufactured diamonds.
The hardest marketing will be up to husbands to convince their wives that the synthetic ones are just as good.
Kevin Castro, a jeweler in Cedar City, Utah, comes to a surprised halt. “These are awfully pretty,” he says. I tell him that they are man-made and ask if that bothers him. “If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it’s not grown in some steamy hot jungle in Central America,” he says. “It’s grown in a hothouse somewhere in California. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a beautiful orchid.”
So, is a diamond real if it’s made in a lab or only if it’s mined from the earth?
World Press Photo of the Year – 2011.
Check out all the 2011 winners from Worldpressphoto.org or view them at The Big Picture.
The smartest people are pointing us to games
Reginald Braithwaite shares my sentiment about a tragedy in technology.
What makes me sad is that the pinnacle of our computing power, the massive behavioural engine that is Google Adwords/Adsense, has decided that when someone is reading about dinosaurs, the most profitable thing to do is show them ads for games. Not books about dinosaurs, or even dinosaur games, but games.
We take a generation of incredibly smart people who have been rigorously trained to deliver amazing code, running on a massive computing engine, and when confronted with a human being trying to learn something, they try to distract him with games. Can you imagine Google in charge of textbooks? In my children’s time, textbooks will be immersive experiences, complete with Google’s avatars whispering “Psst! Math is hard, let’s play games instead of studying.” Can you imagine Google making eyeglasses? They would obscure anything educational with virtual billboards for dating sites.
Thank goodness for apps like AdBlock that make the web a more beautiful place. I’m not robbing any website publishers any revenue because I wouldn’t be clicking on the ads anyway. I’d just be leaving the site in disgust and finding somewhere else to go.
That would be messy. Check out more Brilliantly Sarcastic Responses To Completely Well-Meaning Signs on Happy Place
Solve for X: Neal Stephenson on getting big stuff done
(by wesolveforx).
I’m not a sy-fi geek, but this video has something for everyone. It has a few things to agree with and a few things to disagree with.
