Links voor 5 februari 2014

BBC News – YouTube starts auditing video views
The video-sharing website YouTube said it has started to "audit" the number of views a video has received. The move is aimed at preventing users from artificially inflating view counts which, YouTube said, mislead people about the popularity of a video.

Lists of Note
Late-1979, New York Times columnist William Safire compiled a list of "Fumblerules of Grammar" — rules of writing, all of which are humorously self-contradictory — and published them in his popular column, "On Language." Those 36 fumblerules can be seen below, along with another 18 that later featured in Safire's book, Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage.

Two big announcements.
Moving forward, we will be a one product company. That product will be Basecamp. Our entire company will rally around Basecamp.

Down the feminist rabbit hole
I fell down a rabbit hole today. By reading this: An Incomplete Guide to Feminist infighting. Bemused, I chased links and read manifestos and counter-manifestos for a couple of hours until the sources just began to repeat themselves. But in some respects my confusion was just beginning. As I was falling through all these diatribes like Alice wondering how deep the rabbit hole goes, one of the thoughts uppermost in my mind was Poe’s Law: “Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.” There was no humor down this rabbit hole. I found myself in the land beyond parody. On this evidence, I suspect it would be nigh-impossible to write a literate spoof of modern feminism that even many of its disputants wouldn’t blithely mistake for a real ideological position. And I found myself thinking of the Sokal Hoax.

Andart: Greetings from Double-Earth
A question came up on the Extropians list about what a planet twice as large as Earth would be like. Being an obsessive worldbuilder that has been reading too much exoplanet papers recently I jumped at the question, of course.

Andart: Torus–Earth
One question at Io9 that came up when they published my Double Earth analysis was "What about a toroidal Earth?" This is by no means a new question, and there has been some lengthy discussions online and earlier modelling. But being a do-it-yourself person I decided to try to analyze it on my own.