Russian Sledges

Shorter Christina Hoff Summers: “Men drive like this, women drive like this. So it’s OK if the latter have constrained economic and political opportunities.”

Artist Shepard Fairey may be best known for Obey Giant and his Barack Obama "Hope" poster, but his latest work will be conquering an entirely different realm: outer space. The artist has designed the patch for an upcoming mission to the International Space Station called ARK1 — Advanced Science and Research — that will run from September 2013 through March 2014. ARK1 will be the first flight managed by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), a non-profit organization that was set up by the US Congress in order to help promote research aboard the ISS.

CASIS had originally contract a design agency in Florida called Fiction to design the patch; Fiction then brough Fairey onto the project. While the badge is...

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We were creating a website for a client. We had to use her company’s CMS system which we (and all employees in the company) were trained to use. She skipped the training. Before a new or edited page could go live, she had to approve it. Instead of using the CMS system, she insisted that I take and email her screen captures of every web page for her review.

One day, she called me.

Client: You screwed this all up! The web pages are all wrong

Me: Oh God, what happened?

Client: None of the links work!

Pears that look like chubby little Buddha-like babies have been spotted for sale in Chinese supermarkets, marketed as “happy/joyful doll pears.” To create these pear dolls, the fruit is molded into its humanoid shape during the growth process on the tree itself. Daily Mail reported last year that an entrepreneurial farmer named Hao Xianzhang has been developing the process for several years and hopes to sell them in the United Kingdom.

images via RocketNews24

image via Dingmeizi

image via Daily Mail

via RocketNews24, Nerdcore

Since Brian worked on the server side, his list of Stupid Feed Tricks didn’t include my very favorite feed screw-up.

A lot of hotels and similar offer wi-fi. When you open a page in your browser, it redirects you to their login page.

Those systems don’t differentiate between an http request made by a feed reader and an http request made by a browser. (Nor should they.)

But what happens is that you launch your reader and it gets a redirect for every single feed, to some kind of URL like http://dumbhotel.com/register.aspx.

Normally that would be fine. It’s just a redirect, and once you have actually logged in you can do a refresh in your reader and all’s well.

But!

No!

A bunch of these dumb systems redirect using a permanent redirect: they use 301 instead of 302.

When a feed reader gets a permanent redirect, it’s supposed to take that to mean: “Hey, the feed moved. It’s over here now. Save the new URL and use the new one from now on.”

And if you don’t do that in your reader, and your feed reader is popular enough, smart people who quite rightly care about proper behavior will call you out. You have to do that.

So you write your feed reader to do the right thing — and then one of your customers goes to a dumb hotel, opens their laptop, and their subscription list is wiped out. Every feed URL is replaced with http://dumbhotel.com/register.aspx. And now they can’t get their news, and they don’t know how to get it back.

ghdos:

pol102:

Via firstbook:

If you work with kids from low-income neighborhoods, First Book can help you get brand-new, high-quality books.

This is how income inequality happens. Read to your kids, people! And donate to First Book, while you’re at it.

SIGNAL BOOOOOOOOST!!!

Yes.

Today, Google announced that it will be adding filters to Google Images Search for animated GIFs. In order to specifically search for GIFs, click “Search Tools,” “Any Type,” and select “Animated.” Google has also added the option to search for images with a transparent background by selecting “Transparent” from the “Any Color” dropdown menu.

via Google Operating System, CNET

Google is showing off its new voice recognition technologies in Chrome with the Peanut Gallery, a Chrome experiment that allows users to add intertitles to silent films by speaking aloud.

via Google Blog

Theodore Roosevelt is perhaps the most prolific American president, having published over forty books and numerous articles during his life. His very first publication was significantly less august than his later writings: a four-page pamphlet titled The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N.Y., co-written with his friend Hal Minot and published in 1877, when Roosevelt was nineteen years old.

Despite (or perhaps encouraged by) his love of hunting, Roosevelt was an avid naturalist. As a child, he kept notebooks detailing his observations of the wildlife surrounding him. He was not always just a passive observer of nature; on a family trip to Egypt when he was fourteen he shot hundreds of birds and stuffed many of them with his own taxidermy kit. When he entered Harvard in 1876, he intended to study zoology.

In the summer between their freshman and sophomore years, Roosevelt and fellow Harvard student Hal Minot camped in the Adirondacks for several weeks, observing the wildlife and taking notes for their list. (TR’s journal from the trip can be viewed online) Approximately one hundred copies of the resulting pamphlet were printed and issued both for sale and for private distribution by its authors. It received favorable reviews in ornithological journals, and established Roosevelt as a promising young naturalist.

Aside from its importance as the first publication by the future president, the pamphlet is also the first scientific study of bird life in the Adirondacks.

This post is part of a series called “Auspicious Debuts.” Houghton staff members will feature “firsts” from the Library’s collections ranging from first editions and first appearances in print and on stage to novelties, innovations, and the unprecedented. All posts associated with this series may be viewed by clicking on the AuspiciousDebuts tag.

[Thanks to Heather Cole, Assistant Curator of Modern Books & Manuscripts & Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, for contributing this post.]

On Wednesday April 10th, Nick Wilding, Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at Georgia State University, will give the 97th George Parker Winship Lecture. “Forging the Moon: or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo” will discuss a copy of Galileo’s landmark Sidereus Nuncius, claimed to hold Galileo’s hand-drawn images of the moon observed through a telescope for the first time. Wilding’s talk will examine the evidence that the copy is in fact a forgery, and how modern technology facilitates both the creation and exposure of such forgeries.

Antiquarian bookseller Roger Gaskell will give the annual Hofer lecture on April 16th, entitled “A Peculiar Facility for Imagining: Visual Strategies in the early Royal Society.” The talk will focus on the ways visual images were used to communicate scientific information in the publications of Royal Society Fellows in the 1650s and 1660s, such as the illustration from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, below.

Both talks are scheduled for 5:30pm in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. See the HCL Events page for more information.

Bill

At NewsGator and Sepia Labs I worked with Brian Reischl, one of the server-side guys. Among other things, he worked on NewsGator’s RSS content service, which reads n million feeds once an hour.

(I don’t know if I can say what n is. It surprised me when I heard it. The system is still running, by the way.)

Brian is intimately acquainted with the different ways feeds can be screwed up. So he posted Stupid Feed Tricks on Google Docs.

I quote the entire thing below for people like me who don’t have Google accounts. The below is all by Brian:

Stupid HTTP Tricks

1. When the feed is gone/errored, publisher may still return a 200 OK but send an HTML page instead.
2. Using permanent redirects for temporary errors. In one instance, all the Microsoft blogs had a temporary system error. All the feeds did a permanent redirect to the same system error page, and we updated all 40,000 feeds to point to that one URL. Whoops.
3. Using very slow or overloaded servers. It might take 60 seconds just to connect and send the request, another 60 seconds to first response byte, and so on. This can bog down your content retrieval.
4. Very slow responses, or responses that never actually complete (ie, you hang trying to read data essentially forever)
5. Infinitely long responses. eg, feed server has an error and prints an error message in a infinite loop until something stops it. Hopefully it’s stopped by a check in your system, rather than consuming all the memory on your server.
6. Sending back things that are not XML (eg, videos). It can help to check Content-Type and Content-Length headers, but sometimes they misidentify RSS as something else (eg, text/plain).
7. Returning an HTML page containing HTML/Javascript redirects instead of using HTTP redirects.
8. Infinite redirect loops.
9. Long (but non-infinite) chains of redirects.
10. Responding with 304 Not Modified if you send any If-None-Match/If-Modified-Since header, even if the feed has changed.
11. Throttling your IP address. Some don’t tell you they’re throttling. Some provide Retry-After headers, but the HTTP status code can vary. eg, Twitter used to use their cutesy “420 Enhance Your Calm” response, then switched to “500 Internal Server Error”. Some use “503 Unavailable”. You’re mostly covered if you look for Retry-After headers in every non-success response..
12. Redirecting (perhaps permanently) to a URL that’s already in your system. So now you either have a duplicate feed, or you have to update clients somehow. Note this can sometimes be legitimate, eg consolidating multiple feeds into one.

Stupid XML Tricks

1. Any sort of XML well-formedness error you can think of. Missing closing tags, mismatched tags, bad escaping, not quoting attributes, missing root elements.
2. Including unescaped HTML content inside a tag - which sort of works, except that most HTML isn’t XML-compliant.
3. Putting in characters that are illegal in XML documents (eg, some non-printable characters that should be escaped, but aren’t)
4. Declaring the document as ISO-8859-1 encoding, but actually using UTF-8, with some Arabic characters in it.

Stupid RSS/Atom Tricks

1. Missing any element you can think of.
2. Adding custom elements without namespaces.
3. Using common extension elements without defining the namespaces (eg, using the common “mrss” namespace prefix for MediaRSS elements, without actually specifying that namespace anywhere)
4. Not providing a GUID.
5. Providing the same GUID for every post in the feed (eg, using the feed URL as the GUID)
6. Providing the same GUID for every post, but changing each time you request the feed (eg, using the current date/time)
7. Using a different GUID for each post, changing each time you request the feed (eg, generating an actual GUID each time the feed is requested)
8. Not giving a PubDate
9. Changing the PubDate on every retrieval.
10. Changing the PubDate when a post is edited, rather than using a lastUpdated tag.
11. Putting a tiny number of posts in the feed (sometimes just one). These types then usually publish 10 articles in the space of two minutes, and wonder why you’re missing 9 of them.
12. Putting only one post in the feed, with a GUID that never changes. When there are new posts, just the title and description change. (I believe this was a bunch of Japanese newspaper sites.)
13. Updating post content without changing the lastUpdated date (or not having one)
14. Updating post metadata (eg, enclosures, MediaRSS extensions, etc) with or without changing the lastUpdated date.
15. Treating their feed as append-only, so over time the feed grows without bound. eg, each request might pull back 10,000 posts covering the entire 8 year history of the feed.
16. Specifying dates in whatever their language’s “Date.ToString()” spits out. eg, “Tuesday, March 31st, Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand And Twelve, 4:59 PM”
17. Not specifying timezones for dates (very common. It’s easy to just assume UTC, but note that can yield pubdates in the future).
18. Specifying dates that are far in the past or future (anything up to thousands of years)
19. Having the Link element point to another site. This is actually pretty common (eg, DaringFireball). This can be a problem depending on how you’re identifying individual posts, or if you’re trying to detect duplicates across feeds.

Other Stupid Tricks

1. Updating posts very frequently. Newspapers are very fond of this. In 4 hours they might change a post 12 times, by the end it might have nothing in common with the original article (completely different title, completely different body). Sometimes combined with not using lastUpdated, or just not changing lastUpdate.
2. Publishing updated posts as new posts, so you have 12 versions of the same post in the feed.
3. Occasionally giving you an two-week-old version of the feed for one or two requests. It looked like one server in a cluster had cached an old version and wasn’t updating it. (This was the New York Times back in ~2009. They might’ve fixed it by now.)
4. Adding posts very quickly. This is very common with feeds like the StockTwits stream, Twitter feeds (when that was allowed), the “all news” feeds from news organizations, etc. If you only check the feed every 60 minutes, you could easily miss something.
5. Changing content literally every time you get the feed. eg, a feed that returns the current time in all the timezones, or the current weather for 20 different cities.
6. Putting out private data without requiring authorization of any sort. eg, a feed of all your GMail. This isn’t a problem until you provide search or other feed discoverability, and then people’s private data starts showing up. Then they get very angry.
7. Some places will publish a feed and then get angry that you use it, especially if you have ads in your reader. (name redacted before I get sued) got very bent out of shape over that back in ~2007.
8. Providing feeds, but then also using robots.txt to say you can’t crawl it. So now do you violate the robots.txt, or not let your users subscribe to feeds because the publisher is a dipshit?
9. Providing valid, but limited interest feeds. eg, search feeds (couches for sale in Portland on Craigslist!). Also lots of custom things like combinations from Yahoo Pipes (or whatever equivalent people come up with), bookmark/favorite feeds, etc. Can lead to lots of duplicate (or near duplicate) posts, and lots of feed retrievals that very few people care about.
10. Publishers will routinely have 2-4 copies of the exact same feed. eg, one sourced from their site, and another republished through FeedBurner. Note: FeedBurner includes extension elements that tell you what the source feed and post were.
11. Including malicious Javascript or HTML inside of the content in hopes of hacking your system. There was a test suite for this, unfortunately I don’t have the URL handy just now.

Random Notes

1. You should think hard about canonicalization of URLs. Some parts of the URL can be case-sensitive (path and query) other parts can’t (protocol, host and post). Users (and webmasters) will absolutely use different upper/lower casing in different places.
2. If you build a database index on FeedUrl, consider that 99% of them start with “http://”, which makes for a shitty index. Consider separating the protocol into its own column, and then indexing on the remainder of the URL. Alternatively, you could index on a hashed value of the URL. Theoretically you could have collisions, but in practice there are not that many feeds.

Religious leaders from a variety of faiths, including clergy from Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist and Unitarian churches from more than 70 cities and towns across the state signed the letter opposing the governor’s plan.

Signers included the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, the bishop of the Louisiana Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church and president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

This is a two player experience, but you can also play it solo. Press R to restart game. Player one: W, A, S, D Player two: UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT – [Author's Description]

A typographical character is simply a printed symbol—this includes letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. The ? is called a question mark; ( and ) are called parentheses; and ; is known as the semicolon. But you know that already, and I suspect you’re beginning to wonder how one could possibly wring drops of “fascinating” from the dry towel of typography. And that’s fair. But did you know the division sign has a name? What about the mysterious origins of the paragraph sign? Where did the % sign come from? ¿Why on Earth do Spanish-speakers put those upside-down question marks at the beginning of their sentences? Read on!

The pilcrow, also less elegantly called the “paragraph mark,” serves a number of purposes, most of which involve denoting the presence or location of a paragraph in one way or another. Most commonly, it’s used in word processing programs to indicate a “carriage return” “control character;” that is to say, a non-permanent mark showing where a paragraph ends. There is disagreement over the origin of the name; The Oxford English Dictionary, for one, likes to think it comes from a string of corruptions of the word “paragraph.” I prefer to side with the Oxford Universal Dictionary, which suggests that the sign itself looks a lot like a featherless crow—a “pulled crow.” The symbol itself derives from the letter C—you can still see it in there—which stood for the Latin “capitulum,” or “chapter.” The two lines that ended up vertically crossing the C were a sort of editorial note from the writer.

The pilcrow was used in the Middle Ages, in an earlier form, as a way of marking a new train of thought before the paragraph became the standard way of accomplishing this. Now, among its myriad uses are in academic writing (when citing from an HTML page), legal texts (when citing a specific paragraph), and in proofreading (an indication that a paragraph should be split in two).

The ampersand is a logogram used to mean “and.” The symbol itself is based on a shorthand version of the Latin word for “and”—et—and in certain fonts, you can still clearly see an ‘e’ and a ‘t’ linked together (Adobe Caslon, for instance). The word ampersand has a somewhat unusual origin—it’s a corruption of the hard-to-parse, multilingual (English and Latin) phrase “& per se and,” which means “& by itself is ‘and.’” Confused? Don’t worry—that’s only natural. All it means is: “The symbol &, all by its little self, simply means and.” And where did this phrase come from? Well, in the early 1800s, & was considered the 27th letter of the English alphabet, and since saying “X, Y, Z, and” would be confusing, “and per se and” was said instead. It doesn’t take a major stretch of the imagination to fathom how this could quickly turn into ampersand, which it did by around 1837.

Because people like to make up urban legends based on everything, including stodgy ol’ typographical marks, there’s a vicious rumor floating around that French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère used the mark so much that it eventually got called “Ampere’s and.” Don’t believe it for a second. In the end we’re left with a pretty little symbol that has more than a few variants.

What?! You’ve never heard of the interrobang!? Really? Well, now you have, so all is forgiven. An interrobang is described as a “nonstandard punctuation mark” (it’s part of the punctuation counterculture), used to end sentences where you really want both the exclamation point and the question mark. While the use of both marks side by side had been prevalent for some time, it wasn’t until 1962 when an advertising executive named Martin K. Speckter decided that enough was enough—no longer would he withstand the tyranny of two separate punctuation marks when one would suffice. He asked readers to suggest names—rejecting such fine ideas as rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest—and ultimately settled upon interrobang, a combination of the Latin root “interro” (think “interrogate”), and “bang,” which is printer’s slang for the exclamation mark. The word is used to describe both the two side by side (!? or ?!), or the combined symbol ?.

What we know as @ has a lot of different monikers—including “at sign,” “at symbol,” “ampersat,” and “apetail”—but is unusual in that it doesn’t have a widely-accepted name in English. In Spanish, it is known as an arroba, and in French the arobase. @ has two primary usages—its original one, used in commerce to mean “at the rate of,” and more recently, “directed at” (primarily in email and in social media like Twitter). It has been claimed (by Italian professor Giorgio Stabile) that the symbol is actually over 500 years old, to represent an “amphora”—a unit of capacity used in commerce. It first made its way onto a typewriter as early as 1885, and has since found its way into our hearts.

A couple of fun facts:

- The Spanish arroba was a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds.
- The names for @ in other languages often derive from the idea that it looks like an animal. To wit: apenstaartje (Dutch for “monkey’s tail); papacy (Greek for “little duck); dalphaengi (Korean for “snail”); sobachka (Russian for “little dog”).

Guillemets are what the French use instead of quotation marks. In addition to the physical differences, the usage differs as well—generally, guillemets open and close entire conversations or exchanges, rather than individual utterances. Amusingly, the guillemet is named after a French printer named Guillaume Le Bé from the 16th century; “Guillemet” is a diminutive of “Guillaume.” One can only assume that French people call our quotation marks “Willies,” “li’l Bills,” or “Mini Williams.”

The Obelus, more commonly known as “the division sign” for reasons I can’t fathom, comes from an Ancient Greek word for a sharpened stick or other similar pointy object. It shares its roots with the word “obelisk.” The obelus was once used to denote sections of writing that were considered incorrect or suspicious; in other words, it would have been perfect for Wikipedia editors. It was first used to mean “division” in 1659 by Swiss mathematician Johann Rahn. While still used frequently in the US and in Britain, it is not commonly used to mean division in most of the rest of the world.

In Spanish, when a sentence ends with a question mark or an exclamation point, it also starts with an inverted one. ¿Porque? Well, I’ll tell you porque. In 1754, the Spanish Royal Academy decided that the Spanish language had a dire problem: when you start reading a sentence, you often have no way of telling if it’s a question or not until you get to the very end.

Consider the sentence vas a ir a la tienda? (Are you going to go to the store?). Up until you get to the question mark, you are totally in the dark—is it a question, or simply a declarative sentence stating “you are going to go to the store”? In English, we have ways of indicating that a question is coming, so that proper inflection can be used, as well as to help with comprehension. In Spanish, you used to need contextual clues to help you out before the Royal Academy had its way. They also decided that the exclamation point would be lonely, so they advocated for its inverted use as well.

Though the language was slow to adopt this new convention, it is now a fully integrated part of the language. A few interesting usage notes:

- Short, unambiguous questions are often written without the inverted mark—Quien eres?
- In digital communication, the inverted mark is frequently left off (emails, instant messaging, texts).
- Some authors refuse to use inverted marks.
- Writers can get playful with the marks, including starting a sentence with a ¡ and ending it with a ?.
- ¿ can be used in the middle of a sentence if the whole sentence is not a question, but rather the final clause.
- Note that ¿ and ¡ are positioned differently than ? and !; they hang below the line.

File this under “things we use all the time but don’t know their name.” Ditto marks are those quotation-looking-guys you use to save your tired wrist from a few more seconds of writing, indicating that what’s directly above should be repeated. Though one might suspect (“one” being “me” before I researched it) that the word ditto may have been related to the Latin root “di” (meaning “two”, as in when you say “ditto” you mean “me too!”), it in fact derives from an early (c. 1620) form of the Italian word for “to say.” Originally, it was used to avoid needless repetition when writing a series of dates in the same month.

A “ditto mark” is a type of “iteration mark.” Other languages have their own, notably Chinese, Japanese, and Ancient Egyptian. It’s tough to fathom why Ancient Egyptian scribes might have needed a way to cut down on chiseling elaborate drawings into rock.

Take a look at the percent sign. Look at each of the three individual marks—a circle, a line, a circle. Remind you of anything? Does it, perhaps, remind you of a certain number, with the digits rearranged and realigned? A very important number? Maybe . . . the number 100?

The % sign, of course, means that the preceding number should be understood as being divided by one hundred—”per cent.” The slash mark used to be straight across, with zeroes above and beneath, but it gradually became slanted—leading to what D.E. Smith, in 1925, called the “solidus form” of the percent sign. The solidus, aka slash, virgule, fraction bar, and other names, is this sign: /.

Because there is disagreement about everything, there is disagreement over whether there should be a space between the number and the % sign, over whether it should be per cent or percent, and when you should use the % symbol and when you should instead write out the word.

Once I learned the origins of the terms “upper case” and “lower case,” it seemed so obvious. I mused: does everyone know this but me? What else are my friends and family keeping from me? Instead, though, I decided to convince myself that legions of Listversers were in the dark like me, too embarrassed to say anything. Take comfort, fellow readers, for you may remain anonymous in your ignorance.

Now then: in the early days of printing, when each letter was set individually, the letters were kept in cases. The capital letters were kept in—you guessed it—the “upper case,” less convenient to the printer because of how relatively few capital letters are used, while the lower case letters were kept in the more accessible—wait for it—”lower case.” It’s as simple as that, really. This usage of the terms dates back to 1588.

Fun facts about cases:
- The use of two cases in a written language is called “bicameral script.” Languages with only one case are called “unicase.”
- So what were lower-case letters called before they used cases at all? Well, we have other words to describe them—Upper-case letters are called majuscules (and, of course, capitals), and lower-case letters are called minuscule. Note the spelling difference with the word miniscule.

The post 10 Fascinating Typographical Origins appeared first on Listverse.