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Guys! Did You Know All The Code In Tech Movies Is Fake?

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Fans of Dr. Who might be disappointed to know that their hero isn't actually parsing a screen full of code in the season seven episode "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship." Actually, what he's looking at is an SVG file of a light wave from Wikipedia.

John Graham-Cumming, a programmer for CloudFlare, is uncovering Hollywood's tomfoolery in his Tumblr Source Code in TV and Films. He started pointing out what the code in popular entertainment actually does on January 3 when he pointed out the code in the film Elysium was lifted from a version of the Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual and appropriated to reboot the space station.

The resulting hilarity via the laziness of producers and the industry's basic assumption that viewers won't actually care enough to fact check is priceless. Case in point: CSI:NY trying to pass two pages of HTML headers in a silly handwritten font as a hack to Gears of War.

Amongst the gibberish and nonsense, though, are a few legitimate uses of programming languages. Graham-Cumming points out the SQL in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo appears to be legitimate for researching murders. The JavaScript code from Stargate SG1: The Ark of Truth is correct, the only problem being that it's actually written for a Canadian bank.

The Tumblr isn't long (yet), but it's worth going through the five pages of archives for a giggle and, more productively, to see a discussion happening among bored programmers. If you're time crunched, there's a 10-question quiz based on posts from Graham-Cumming's findings.

It's amazing that "movie code" isn't compete gibberish; we figured it would be generated by something like HackerTyper, where hitting any key generates bunk code in an aesthetically-convincing sandbox. (If you're new to HackerTYper, try hitting the alt (option on a Mac) key three times and see what happens.)


30 Ways To Leave Google Apps Behind

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Many of us rely on multiple Google services in order to conduct our everyday lives and run our businesses. Entrepreneur Joel Runyon thinks that's a mistake, since ostensibly Google is turning evil. So he wrote The Complete Guide To Leaving Google to help you to at least diversify the range of online services you use.

"I believe it's a bad idea for one company to have control over multiple choke points in my business," writes Runyon. "Especially when their service is offered for free, and I have no path of recourse with them."

We expanded on Runyon's list to bring you 30 ways to leave Google. The company allows you to export all your data to help you on your way.

First, Free Your Identity

Belgian developer Laurent Eschenauer staged his own PRISM break last year, unplugging from all cloud services and creating his own cloud on a hosted server. One of the first things he advises doing is getting your own domain and email address.

"Start decoupling your identity from the underlying implementations today," Eschenauer says. "This is the first step to free yourself from the corporate silos controlling your data and identity." His own private email address previously forwarded to a Gmail address, but that made it easy to switch email implementations.

Email

Runyon recommends the privacy-focused, ad-free email service Hushmail, which is based in Canada. Hushmail is a web-based email service with built-in encryption that also works on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry (via IMAP, POP, or mobile website). With the Hushmail business plan, you can use your own domain name.

Many commentators also recommend paid webmail service Fastmail, which is owned by the Norwegian Opera Software, registered in Micronesia and based in Australia. Personal mail starts from $10 a year, and you can have your own domain from $40 up. ReadWriteWeb has a comprehensive guide to switching from Gmail to Fastmail.

ZohoMail is also worth a look. Zoho's applications turn up in several categories below.

If you are hosting, Eschenauer switched back to IMAP and Mozilla Thunderbird, together with Enigmail for PGP.

Calendars

Runyon raves about Any.Do's Cal. "This has actually taken over my entire scheduling setup," he says. Other reviewers describe the interface as somewhat confusing.

Tempo is a calendar app from the makers of Siri, which scans your email (Gmail, Exchange, iCloud, Yahoo, or IMAP) and combines this information with your calendar to create contextual appointments.

Sunrise, brought to you from a couple of former Foursquare employees, does something similar, grabbing data like birthdays from Facebook and using them to populate your schedule. Tripit flights, Songkick concerts, Foursquare check-ins, and Eventbrite conferences are expected to be added soon.

Blogging

Runyon suggests a self-hosted installation of Wordpress. This fits in with advice from the editor of The Magazine, Glenn Fleishman, on why you should be your own platform and host your own content rather than relying on the goodwill and longevity of platforms created by others.

If you do want to check out a hosted alternative, journalism network Muckrack suggests an interesting quartet of new content-creation services. Marquee lets anyone create a beautifully-designed feature story. Ghost is a Kickstarter project to create a super-simple blogging service. The better-known Medium has been hosting high-quality writing in a pared-down interface for some time, while Jux maximizes the size and scope of content, giving YouTube videos, Instagram posts, and photos room to breathe.

Web-browsing

Runyon plumps for Firefox. Eschenauer suggests various privacy extensions, and of course you can change the default search engine from Google.

For Safari and Opera, check out Disconnect extension, which allows users to block more than 2,000 third-party sites that track browsing histories.

If privacy is your main concern, check out Tor browser for obfuscating web traffic. Tor bounces your communications requests around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world in order to conceal the sites you visit and your physical location.

Search

Runyon's choice is privacy-conscious search engine DuckDuckGo, which received a major boost in the wake of the NSA revelations and served a billion searches in 2013. The search engine does not store any personal information such as IP addresses and enables encryption by default.

If you are addicted to Google's search results, Startpage will query Google with your search terms and load the results through their own servers. Startpage strips a search query of all personal information, leaving Google with no clue about your identity.

Eschenauer recommends using ixquick as a search proxy for Google. Ixquick queries several search engines simultaneously and aggregates the results. It doesn't even log your IP address, but you can still personalize your search via an anonymous cookie.

Photo Sharing

According to Runyon, and pretty much everyone else, the Yahoo-owned Flickr is still the only game in town for serious photographers, but we also like 500px as a substitute.

Documents

Runyon recommends Evernote, which also comes up in Lifehacker's list. A new partnership with document editor OfficeSuite now lets Evernote users edit documents in their library with the OfficeSuite app. Zohodocs is another possibility. The free version has a 5 GB limit.

For file sharing, Joel lists Dropbox, Box, Mega, and iCloud. Wuala, based in Switzerland, specializes in secure cloud storage. Not even the company itself can access your files. You get 5 GB of storage in the free plan.

If you are self-hosting, Eschenauer uses the open-source Owncloud. "A great Dropbox replacement," he says, "and it also provides us with shared calendar, contact list, etc." OwnCloud provides universal access to your files via the web, your computer, or your mobile devices. You can easily view and sync contacts, calendars, and bookmarks, and it provides basic online editing.

Analytics

There are an increasing number of good analytics tools that give Google a run for its money. Runyon plimps for Clicky, a simple replacement for Google Analytics. PC World notes that "Clicky's social-media tracking is weak . . . . WordPress users should take note that Clicky isn't compatible with Jetpack," but otherwise gives it a good review. It's free for up to 3,000 daily pageviews on a single website

Laurent uses the open-source Piwik, which is self-hosted only but "provides me with more data than I had in Google. and it has a beautiful interface."

Maps

Runyon abandons the field when confronted with the glorious Google Maps. Other commentators says that its worth giving Nokia Maps, aka HERE, a try. Bing Maps is recommended by Lifehacker.

Berlin-based startup Skobbler supplies an Android app called GPS Navigation & Maps, which adds navigation to Open Street Map for the bargain price of $0.99. You can use it offline and avoid those pesky roaming charges, which are especially onerous in Europe when a single train ride can involve passing through three different countries. See a full review of Skobbler's app on GigaOM.

Google Voice And Hangouts

Ruyon doesn't cover this, but Skype, iMessage, and FaceTime are the obvious alternative. Lifehacker has an article on building your own Google Voice replacement from other services, and it all works outside the U.S.

Seahawks' Marshawn Lynch Generates Second Earthquake Of His Career

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When Marshawn Lynch strode into the end zone Sunday, Seahawks' fans delighted in their own celebration so much so that their effort showed up on three different seismographs. And it's no accident. Qwest Field's aluminum construction works as an amplifier to the already fanatical following of football's most Pacific Northwestern team.

It's important to note that seismographs read ground motion, not sound, although we can safely assume the fans' eruption was also loud.

It will a few days before the reading can be applied to the Richter scale, but this isn't the first time Seahawks' fans have man-made a quake. In 2011, the same Marshawn Lynch tallied another touchdown against the same New Orleans' Saints team they made suffer Sunday. The original quake registered between a one and two on the Richter scale. Scientists aren't sure yet which "Beast Quake" was stronger, but said they should know in the next few days.

[Hat Tip:ESPN]

Yelp Reviewers Can't Be Anonymous Anymore

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Hey, curmudgeonly Yelp reviewers: You can no longer hide behind the Internet cloak of anonymity. A court in Virginia has declared that the the First Amendment does not protect users posting to the review-based site Yelp.

The decision was reached after Joe Hadeed, owner of Hadeed Carpet Cleaning in Virginia, began proceedings against the San Francisco-based company because "seven users had left anonymous negative feedback about his business on Yelp," reports the BBC. The U.S. court found that Hadeed presented "sufficient reason" that some of the user reviews were not written by actual customers. Typically, the First Amendment protects online reviewers because it is someone's actual opinion based on first-hand experience as a patron.

In a statement released by the Virginia court, they outlined the reasons for the ruling, saying, "If the reviewer was never a customer of the business, then the review is not an opinion; instead the review is based on a false statement." The First Amendment does not protect against slanderous speech. If the reviewers are subpoenaed, it might make us all reconsider next time we want to complain publicly about those fries.

Literature Reflects Our Lives, With A 10-Year Delay

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Capital-L "Literature" is infamous for bumming readers out with heart-wrenchingly life-like characters and sad themes--but what if some of that moroseness can be tracked back to environment?

Researchers have unveiled a correlation between economic mood and aggregate literary mood, but oddly, there's an incubation period. Literary misery can be correlated with economic misery of roughly 10 years prior, say the researchers at the University of Bristol, who sifted through five million digitized books to get their results. The researchers used Google Ngram Viewer with Google Books and the WordNet Affect (WNA) literary analysis tool to create a "literary misery index" roughly equivalent to aggregate sad words minus aggregate happy words. In the 20th century, periods of literary misery surfaced a decade after economic misery in WWI, the Great Depression, and the mid-'70s energy crisis.

While the results are specifically tagged to English-language literature and the U.S. economic misery index (inflation plus unemployment), researchers cross-referenced their findings with the equivalent German literary and economic metrics, finding an identical correlation and decade lag.

The lag is harder to pin down. University of Bristol professor Alex Bentley, the paper's author, thinks the lag impacts youth during their teens and then manifests in their writing during their early productive years a decade later. He used the stagflation of the 1970s as an example of influence on the increased misery in '80s writing, when children who grew up in the previous decade's economic adversity came of age.

The University of Bristol researchers compared their findings with "emotion extraction" tools that use words as data points to statistically track feelings--which researchers have applied to Twitter for years in a model coined Hedonometrics.

This iOS App Could Cure Your Writer's Block

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Writer's block is a made-up excuse for not doing your work (at least as diagnosed by comedian Jerry Seinfeld). But what if you really just need some input from other people to get your ideas moving?

New creative-writing app Coda is offering some assistance for people looking for a little help with their words. The iOS app lets you ask your friends or its community for input on your next sentence, verse, or whatever you're writing.

While others can contribute to different people's work, the author ultimately decides whose changes get merged into the original document, just like in GitHub or Draft. Users login with their Twitter accounts.

Coda isn't the first app for writers, but it might be the best one yet on iOS. Help Me Write is another community of people offering help writing, but the app is web-only. That service takes a different approach, helping you choose which of your ideas people are most interested in reading about before you waste time writing something irrelevant.

If you're getting the uneasy feeling that all this writing "help" could create a content arms race, then that makes two of us. As more apps and services provide good ways for people to express their creative ideas, a vicious cycle could develop in which readers' expectations float steadily higher as average writers leverage more and more technology just to force their writing to make the grade.

Similar tools are popping up for amateur photographers too. An app called OkDoThis is like Instagram for those who aren't sure what to shoot; members of the app community suggest things to photograph and then the user goes out and does it. Does that still count as creativity?

SOS, SMS! Is Texting Nearing Extinction?

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SMS (Short Message Service) traffic, otherwise known as text messaging, is on a downward spiral. For the first time ever in the U.K., reports have emerged suggesting that people are sending less and less text messages through their cell-phone carriers. Usage has dropped "from 152 billion in 2012 to 145billion in 2013," according to estimates from Deloitte.

Competitive apps that bypass carrier messaging, like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Snapchat--which all use data connections, not SMS protocol--are rising in popularity, making text messages passé. And it looks like the preliminary data about the U.K. is representative of an overall global trend.

Last year, Marketing Charts claimed that U.S. texting habits faced dwindling numbers in 2012, shifting from prior years in which text messages was a rapidly growing communicative tool. In 2012, "Americans texted each other 2.19 trillion times, down 4.9% from the prior year, after at least three consecutive years of growth," according to a survey performed by CTIA. That study attributes the decline to smartphone saturation; the increase in smartphone usage is leading more people to use Internet-based applications for messaging.

Business Insider deduced a similar occurrence in the U.S., but credited the decline to data-using mobile apps as well as the dominance of young mobile users in the market. Smartphone users between the ages of 18 to 24 send text messages at nearly double the rate of users 25 to 34. Additionally, they reported that, "Young Americans send almost 10 times as many texts as Americans over 55."

Still, that growth hasn't cannibalized the growth of data-reliant messaging apps, according to Flurry Analytics, which reported today that messaging and social apps (including photo-sharing apps) grew 203% last year through messaging platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, KakaoTalk, LINE, Facebook Messenger, and SnapChat. Furthermore, the rapid rate of growth of these tools has tripled in usage year over year.

Is there any upside here for cell-phone carriers? Yes, as it turns out: the 55-and-older generation, who are the holdouts for SMS communication, are slowly adopting it. According to The Independent, "Smartphone adoption [in the U.K.] is rising amongst senior citizens (it's expected to reach 68% this year), but these gradual adopters prefer to rely on SMS and calls rather than download a range of confusing apps."

[Hat tip: The Independent]

Nobody Reads Anymore, Could Infinite Scroll Be To Blame?

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Infinite scroll has become a darling feature of websites, rolling out on new platforms every day, streamlining content consumption for readers who will never have to hit a "next page" button again. But that's precisely the problem: the endless content stream may be destroying the reading experience by removing the sensation of "completion" entirely.

The development of infinite scroll has streamlined the flowing of information to your brain into a frictionless, clickless firehose that serves up more content, then more, then more. So, is infinite scroll the brain-rotting equivalent of television? Or is it a "feature?"

Firstly: It has a purpose. Pagination makes for awful UX on a lot of (noncontent) sites--things like lists and photo galleries, for examples. Pagination taxes browser memory, creates script difficulties, and requires waiting for a page refresh. As far as infinite-scroll.com can reckon, infinite scroll can be traced back to a June 2005 greasemonkey script called "Google Auto Pager," though director of UI engineering at PayPal Bill Scott also threw his weight behind the concept around the same time. A year later, questions arose about the failure to navigate on a pageless stream of content, a problem that has yet to be solved. In 2008, another post expressed the anxiety that emerges when content consumption progress isn't tracked via pagination. So this is an issue that has been near-boil for years, but has only tipped this year, as infinite scroll became trendy with web designers.

For better or worse, infinite scroll has remained simple, with few examples of mid-scroll navigation to either return to the top (like Tumblr's dashboard) or indicate content consumption progress. Still, debate continues to rage over infinite scroll's value. In his infamous post "Dissolving That Print Mentality," digital publisher Thomas Baekdal said that conforming to print expectations puts the format first and the content second, that we're satisfied with the dancing bear of pagination because we're complacent that it's appearing on the Internet at all.

The UI argument is important. Tech issues will be worked out and midstream navigation will follow--long-form gaming journalism outlet Polygon is a notable example. DesignShack echoes the concerns noted above, but notes that without infinite scroll progress, we wouldn't have projects like DistanceToMars, which uses the infinite scroll to emphasize galactic distance. Let us know in the comments or on Twitter @fastcolabs if you think there are specific instances where infinite scroll is (or isn't) permissible.


If The Singularity Fails, Civilization Is Basically Screwed

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Ask a scientist, professor, or theoretician if and when the Technological Singularity is imminent, and the responses will vary from "someday in the future," to laughing in your face for bringing the concept up in the first place.

Considering the Singularity is a fun and slightly unsettling mental exercise. Advances are being made constantly--just today, Japanese and German researchers were able to replicate one second of human brain activity in a 40-minute computational process in the fourth-smartest computer on the planet. Connecting more than 1.7 billion nerve cells with 10.4 trillion synapses by way of the open-source Neural Simulation Technology (NEST), this exercise is the one percent of computational depth computers in the next generation will be able to handle. These exascale computers would be able to operate 1,000 times faster than the current fastest, which would allow them to approach human-thinking abilities:

Exascale computers are those which can carry out a quintillion floating point operations per second, which is an important milestone in computing as it is thought to be the same power as a human brain and therefore opens the door to potential real-time simulation of the organ's activity.

Powerful? Absofuckinglutely. The fulfillment of the Singularity's prophetic utopia? Not yet.

AIXI is the term some computer scientists use to refer to a "super-intelligent agent" whose intelligence meets or exceeds ours. In theory, an AIXI machine could meet goals codified by extremely complex equations. Here's Marcus Hutter, who cointed the term AIXI:

Imagine a robot walking around in the environment. Initially it has little or no knowledge about the world, but acquires information from the world from its sensors and constructs an approximate model of how the world works. It does that using very powerful general theories on how to learn a model from data from arbitrarily complex situations. This theory is rooted in algorithmic information theory, where the basic idea is to search for the simplest model which describes your data.

Basically, the "brain" is able to "learn" through trial and error by planning a move and analyzing the environmental response it receives. Essentially, the robot thinks: "If I do this action, followed by that action, etc., this or that will (un)likely happen, which could be good or bad. And if I do this other action sequence, it may be better or worse."

Linguist Noam Chomsky is skeptical of AI processing, arguing it's development is reductively behaviorist, basing actions in a simple reward or punishment system through positive and negative reinforcement. We've been genetically endowed to learn language quickly and use it creatively, and AI will never be able to replicate that.

Other thinkers agree. Years ago, mathematician Vernon Vinge gave a talk evaluating the plausible scenarios leading to a singularity-less outcome. He envisioned the Age of Failed Dreams, where we've failed to "find a soul in the hardware." Moore's Law would have failed; Edelson's Law, that our technological insights are not keeping pace with needs and are increasing exponentially over time, would have backlogged. Resources would still be scarce, and a return to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the situation coined by John Nash, would become normal. "When stoked by environmental stress," Vinge says, this outcome would be "a very plausible civilization killer."

Vinge crafted three future scenarios if the Age of Failed Dreams actualizes. The first predicts destruction by our own hands--MADness perpetrated through nuclear warfare. A second envisions a Golden Age, still planted in cynicism with a rosier outlook in what Vinge calls "the Long Now." A peacefully decimated population, ostensibly antagonistic but bolstered by the "plasticity of our psyche" and penchant for hope, would result in an improved standard of living. Perhaps the number of people rebounds, but ultimately, "the species would become something greater." Greater resources might be allocated to extend longevity to ensure humans, in whatever form we'd be, will actually stick around. It would be the first time there would be people who have experienced the "distant past." Like, 500 years distant.

The third and most tenable scenario, according to Vinge, is the Wheel of Time theory: The dynamic, cyclical relationship of Earth becomes disaffected and even destroyed by our own technological outputs. MADness, sure, but climate change is the more relevant man-made precursor. The polar vortex set record low temperatures across the country. Island nations like Maldives and Kiribati are going under water as sea levels rise; the rising and falling of the largest lake in the Caribbean has "devoured tens of thousands of acres of farmland, ranches, and whatever else stands in its way," according to a story published this past weekend by the New York Times.

A pitfall in toying with the notions of a doomed Long Now is the malaise over how fucked we are as a species. Vinge is careful to hedge the uncertainties that propel this kind of theorizing in the first place, and maybe he's right that we're meant to end up in space to survive. But that seems like a future far, far away.

Your Startup Doesn't Have Funding? Maybe That's A Good Thing

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For all the hundreds of funded tech startups in places like Austin or Seattle active today, there are thousands of unsung entrepreneurs working away at a project, seeking the promised land of early-stage funding. That money may not be all it's cracked up to be though, or so says one startup founder who's been there.

Jean Derely, cofounder of online marketing software company WooRank, says he and his team made a mistake by seeking funding early on. They found no investor interest, which turned out to be an advantage: Forced frugality taught the team how to get the most from what funding they did have, plan better, and not hire excess staff.

But there are varying opinions on the question. Forbes contributor Kevin Ready says to be on the safe side, entrepreneurs should find early funding if possible, because it insures you'll have the wind at your back in the form of bigger budgets, more nimble decision-making, and less personal risk.

"Now, more than ever, startups can start up without investor funding, but taking on investors may be the difference that makes the difference," Ready says.

At least one entrepreneur backed up that opinion on the Hacker News discussion surrounding Derely's WooRank post.

"There are lots of startups that simply couldn't exist without early investment -- anything with high upfront costs combined with economies of scale. I founded a payments processor three years ago -- this is a good example of such a business. It's possible we could have bootstrapped, but it would have been a very different kind of business." --tomblomfield on hackernews

Neil Kane of TechCoktail goes even further, erring on the side of taking as much investment as one can early on. It's better than running out of money later.

"While the challenge of raising money to get your company off the ground is frustrating to be sure, it pales in comparison to the eternal anguish of raising money in distress after you've already started the business and are accountable to investors, customers, and employees."

What if you don't know any investors? Then do things that get their attention, like making money. All this talk about funding may be a moot point if the startup in question isn't generating revenue already. Any investor will tell you that's one of the first things they look for when scouting new investments. Some suggest bootstrapping until you reach $100,000 per month in sales, because few investors will take a company seriously if they don't already have that kind of revenue.

AngelList founder Naval Ravikant says the key to making all this happen is finding "product market fit." This is that magical sweet spot when your product is happily satisfying the needs of a target market segment. The phenomena is elusive, but if it happens, you just might be making good money and won't need to take early funding.

The Internet's Most Mysterious Secret Game Has Begun

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On January 6, for the third year in a row, the Internet's most infamous game began with a tweet that was sent out from a mysterious account with a message that only made sense if you were looking for it.

Hello. Epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good Luck.

Signed "3301," it was more than just a greeting. It was the rabbit hole leading into one of the most under-the-radar nerdfests on the Internet.

For a brief period at the beginning of the last two years, a global Internet puzzle called Cicada 3301 has captured the minds of those who plumb the depths of the darker corners of the Internet looking for puzzles to solve and challenges to outsmart. It's a scavenger hunt of the highest caliber, and no one knows who's behind it--only that they are looking for "highly intelligent individuals." Clues like breadcrumbs are then seeded across the web, almost all of which require extensive knowledge of cryptography and obscure texts to solve--puzzles have referenced a diverse selection of works ranging from that of occultist Aleister Crowley and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It has a lot in common with most Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), which require players to collaborate across the web and in real life--some ARGs have been known to have players pick up packages, go to specific locations, and answer strange telephones in order to solve a mystery or advance a master plot. The ultimate purpose of an ARG can range from elaborate viral marketing campaign to fun diversion, but they usually end with someone stepping out from behind the curtain.

Not so with Cicada. Even amidst growing interest among the press and the best efforts of the web's brightest, we still know just as much about the contest founders or their ultimate goal as we did at the start: almost nothing. That's almost certainly by design, writes Tess Lynch for Grantland:

The frustrating thing about Cicada 3301 is that it self-insulates against casual curiosity-seekers trying to crack it: We are not the puzzle's intended audience, which is as maddening as it is satisfying and true to form.

In fact, those looking to follow along casually can only get so far. After a certain point, the trail invariably leads to the dark web and a dead end if you aren't among the first there. After that, concrete, verifiable information dries up as selected participants are instructed to not divulge further details, like a hacker's Fight Club.

For most of us the trail ends here, right where it began--although the greater Cicada community tirelessly pieces together every scrap of information they can find, contributing to an extensive Wiki and collaborating via Reddit. While few know what happens to those who "win," theories abound on for whom Cicada 3301 is recruiting--government think tanks, hacktivist collectives, and disturbing Nietzschean cults are among those suspected. While suspicions abound, answers about the game's origin are still elusive.

"That's the beauty of it though," computer analyst and Cicada participant Joel Eriksson told Business Insider during last year's challenge. "It is impossible to know for sure until you have solved it all."

Gorgeous, Haunting Images Created By X-Ray

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Dutch medical physicist Arie van 't Riet spent his career working in the departments of radiotherapy, radiology, and nuclear medicine in various hospitals. One day, while training radiographers and physicians, he hit on a novel way of demonstrating the effect of the thickness of a material on X-ray absorption. "I chose flowers," he says. "The thickness of the leaf differs from the thickness of the stem of the flower, but it's all the same material."

Van 't Riet began making X-rays of plants and flowers back in 2007, and subsequently began to digitize, invert, and partially color them. "Some people told me 'That's art,'" he says. "And I became an artist." He describes the process in his TedX talk from last month:

He moved on to capturing animals in his images, starting with stuffed specimens from a taxidermist, which weren't a great success as he explains in his talk, and progressing to using roadkill and the unfortunate victims of his cat. The radiation used in taking the X-rays would damage live animals, so he only uses the bodies of the deceased. Now Van 't Riet creates entire staged natural scenes that he calls "bioramas." "X-rays of flowers you will find all over Internet," he says. "X-rays of complete natural scenes as I make them I think are unique."

An X-ray machine is a type of camera which uses electromagnetic waves called X-rays instead of visible light to expose the film. Bone, fat, muscle, and tumors absorb X-rays to different degrees because of the variation in the density of the tissues. With normal light, you see the surface of an object in color. With X-rays, you see the internal structure in grayscale.

Van 't Riet has his own studio with X-ray equipment and a license to use it. To create a biorama, the artist takes flowers, animals, and other natural objects and arranges them in a simulated natural scene. He calculates the energy and amount of X-ray radiation required to get a well-exposed X-ray film of that specific biorama.

"Technically, these X-rays of bioramas are much more challenging than just flowers," Van 't Riet explains. "That's because of the large difference in X-ray absorption between the thin leaves and the thick animal." Thin leaves require very low-energy X-rays, while you need high-energy rays for animals. For that reason, Van 't Riet sometimes needs to block off certain parts of the scene and take multiple X-rays.

The film is placed on one side of the biorama, the X-ray tube on the other. Turn the beam on and the X-ray film is exposed. The X-ray film is developed and digitized. The digital image is then inverted and finally partly colored.

Van 't Riet would like to add more reptiles, exotic fishes, and birds with pronounced beaks to his work. Van 't Riet has also made 3-D visualizations of his bioramas. The X-ray tube is rotated around the biorama making a new X-ray every 10 degrees. The multiple still images of the scene are combined into a video animation.

Now retired from the hospital, Van 't Riet continues to work in his studio. "Looking with X-ray eyes added a new dimension to my experience of nature," he says. "My eyes only can see the outer surface. My X-rays look inside. And that inner always fascinates me."

Four Things That Make Job Hunting For Developers Hell

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Remember the great Furby Frenzy of 1998? Toy stores were stormed, fights broke out, and the price of those $30 chatty creatures shot up to nearly $200 on the secondary market. The reason was simple: Hasbro simply couldn't make enough Furbys fast enough, and when demand exceeds supply, prices rise. Fifteen years later, Furbymania may be long gone, but we're seeing a similar shortage today in a very different context: the developer job market.

If you're a talented developer today, you're a Furby. Each year, there are more than 150,000 new computing jobs in the U.S., but only 40,000 computer science graduates. We're in the midst of an epic talent shortage: There aren't enough of you, but everyone needs you. In theory, this means that life as a developer today should be wonderful and include endless showers of candies, Cheetos, Ping-Pong games, and the best recruitment practices of any field. So why does everything about finding a new job still suck so much?

With four open jobs for every developer, it shouldn't be so hard to get what you want. But there's a lot broken in recruiting today that's making this process frustrating and inefficient. Here's what's going wrong:

1. Contingency recruiters have become the greatest annoyance in the world

How often are you contacted by recruiters on LinkedIn? One woman found that even her fake programmer profile received messages once every 40 hours. Even worse than the frequency of messages is the content: "Is this William Gates? I'm calling to share an exciting opportunity for a hackster like you that will give you invaluable experience using the Microsoftware stack!" It's usually pretty obvious that they have no idea who you are or what you really want. Which makes sense. You see, from their perspective, it's actually easier for them to harass every single developer they can find rather than take the time to find the right developer. They benefit from playing the numbers game--to your disadvantage. It's one thing to commoditize a product; it's another thing entirely to commoditize people.

2. Traditional job listings don't tell you what you really want to know

Think about what's included in a typical job listing: A section that explains the responsibilities of the job and another section that details required experience. This is essentially a list of demands--not a great way to attract the most in-demand talent. Job listings also don't tend to explain anything about what it's like to actually work for that company, making it impossible for you to figure out if the culture fit is right. This process may work for companies who need to fill roles in an average labor market. But with so many programmer jobs available and not enough programmers to fill them, newer companies can't distinguish themselves from better-known brand names, and established enterprises can't cut through the corporate legalese to show off their work environments.

3. Keyword-based job searching just doesn't work

Matching up specific skills and keywords works great--if you want a job doing exactly what you already know how to do. When employers use keywords to find you, they can only search by skills you've already listed on your résumé rather than cool new languages or technologies that you'd love to learn. And since most talented developers want their next role to be somewhere they can learn more, keyword punching is not a good way to investigate growth opportunities. This leaves plenty of room for candidates and employers to skip over each other like a Craigslist Missed Connection ad.

4. You can no longer control who's contacting you

If cold emails from contingency recruiters weren't bad enough, now there are companies that offer employers the ability to scrape the web for developer footprints and sell their profiles with contact details to employers. Let's be perfectly clear: Messages and emails are fair game when you register for lists, résumé databases, or social-networking sites like LinkedIn. But if you've never opted in, any unsolicited message walks the fine line along the boundary we all hate the most: Internet spam. A world where career advancement involves unsolicited spam seems backward. It takes the control away from you and makes changing jobs even worse for the talent that's most in demand.

There's a lot happening that's turning this ripe market a bit sour. All of the recruiting noise distracts from your primary goal as a developer: building cool things. So the bigger question still remains:

What Can We Do To Fix Recruiting?

First and foremost, recognize the power you have at your fingertips. Being a developer in a market this competitive means you don't need to settle until you've found what you're really looking for--whether that's a set-your-own-schedule remote job or a 9-to-5 job with amazing family benefits. So go out and get it. As the power player, you can also apply pressure to employers who haven't stepped up their A-Game.

However, some of this process is still out of your hands: You can't control what messages recruiters send or how employers contact you. That's one of the things we tried to change with Stack Overflow Careers 2.0. For the first three years, we spent most of our time fine-tuning a hiring product by doing little more than asking developers, "What do you hate about recruiters and changing jobs?" Last year, we started focusing more on what you care about at work, and 9,000 of you told us the elements of a job that are most important to you include the opportunity to learn and grow, a chance to work with a smart team, and good management. Based on that feedback, we introduced Company Pages to encourage companies to think more about how to position themselves in a way that attracts developers and to give you a better idea of what might be a good culture fit. This year, we're adding even more features, with the goal of keeping your needs top of mind. While we haven't figured it all out yet, we're getting closer.

Today, the process is still broken, which means you need to adapt around it. Don't expect amazing employers to find you. Instead, the most valuable thing you can do for your career today is think about what you want the most. Do you want a new job where you can learn new languages, or would you prefer to build on the ones you've mastered? Do you want to learn how to mentor and manage others, or would you prefer to write code all day? Would your life be better if you could work remotely? Don't forget that you're a Furby (circa 1998), and if you take the time to think about what's important to you, odds are pretty good that you'll be able to get it.

Bethany Marzewski is Segment Marketing Manager for Stack Overflow Careers 2.0.

The Smart Home And Office Devices From CES

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The best part about the future is, baby, you're living in it--literally. The "smart home" is becoming a real thing, and we're finally getting choices in our intelligent devices. Here are the best of the bunch.

1. Canary

After raising nearly $2 million on its Indiegogo campaign, excitement over this inexpensive connected security system seems well-founded. The Canary ($199, preorder delivery in July) is a powerhouse of sensors--HD camera, microphone, thermometer, motion detector--that the security it offers isn't so much a trust in its capabilities as it is a responsive window into your house, ready to view at any time.

Of course, it wouldn't be a smart product if it didn't also track your life. The longer you leave it on, the more you can measure the comings, goings, and environmental conditions of your home. This long-term visualization combined with instant updates should something go awry makes the Canary not just a pair of eyes in the home--it's an entire thinking, hearing robot head that offers the same instant access to your home that you expect from the rest of the world.

2. LG Home Chat

Stay with us here. As Charles Arthur of The Guardianpoints out, the moment we stop to think about it, we really don't care to text our washing machine about its spin-cycle progress. Further, these are top-line expensive LG appliances--certainly not an affordable gadget or game-changing feature that would encourage appliance replacement.

What we do care about is LG Home Chat's use of SMS interaction. Device interoperability is hampered by the myriad methods that devices and hubs use to communicate with each other, whether they use Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, Zigbee--SMS' minimal data means we're moving toward catering communication options to the user, both in extending accessible range and expanding the possibility for devices to interpret commands of user language, Siri-style.

"After the shine wears off, consumers will want simplicity--and not have to download an app for each product," says Shane Dyer, CEO of Arrayent, a company that develops connectivity tech for brands like Maytag and Whirlpool. Dyer told MIT Technology Review that consumer pressure will get device designers to simplify connectivity--and what's simpler than sending a text?"

3. Revolv Hub

The Revolv Hub ($299) isn't a single device to be programmed, but a master controller of devices, an ur-device that connects your gizmos to a smartphone app. The Hub has seven wireless radios speaking 10 different wireless languages, meaning your Z-Wave, Insteon, and regular ol' Wi-Fi devices can all link back with ease. The Hub is preset to work with big names like Sonos, Philips hue, and Yale locks right out of the gate, but Revolv is committed to automatic firmware updates that'll bring other devices into its fold.

The best part isn't that you're able to talk to multiple devices through Revolv's umbrella app--it's that the devices can be programmed to talk to each other. If you move within 100 yards of your house, the Kwikset can unlock the door and Sonos can turn up the heat. In Matt Burns of Techcrunch's immortal words, the Revolv Hub is "akin to the formation of the Avengers. Separate, all your devices are like superheros that can stand their own. Together they can take on thousands of aliens dumping out of a wormhole in the sky."

4. SmartThings

Alright, if one's a pioneer, two's a trend--and SmartThings is another hub that wants to lord over your home devices. After a successful Kickstarter in September 2012, SmartThings is just now getting its international devices out to CE-certified countries, a hitch that doesn't seem to apply to Stateside orders. While SmartThings handles smart devices using Z-Wave and Zigbee wireless protocols just like Revolv, SmartThings' secret weapon is interoperability with a suite of optional sensors to tell you when the dog leaves the house or a window is left open. Each will probably run you around $50 (though there are bundles in the store), but the SmartThings hub can be bought alone for $99--a definite plus over Revolv's hefty $299 pricetag.

The SmartThings app is all buddy-buddy with IFTTT ("If This Then That") programming, meaning you can setup protocols like "If I come within 50 feet of the hub, Then unlock/heat up house." Its reigning superiority, however, probably comes from its friendly API and even a purchasable Arduino hookup to the hub. Customizable indeed.

5. Enblink

Don't want to buy a whole hub & caboodle, but happen to have a Google TV? Get the Enblink dongle ($89) and plug it into your Google TV's USB port. Voilà! It's now a hub specifically for Z-wave-connecting smart products. The Enblink works off the GTV's Android architecture and connects to your smartphone, turning it into a control station for your smart gizmos. You can even turn your ordinary lighting fixtures into Enblink-controllable devices via a Z-wave middleman, but it seems you can only buy them in a starter pack with the dongle ($145), which is both curious and lame (same deal with security systems). Buy now for $85!

6. Goji Smart Lock

You knew a smart door lock was coming. Lucky for you, Goji one-ups its predecessors in a dozen ways. Set up auto-unlock to lazily slide your pocket/bag holding your paired phone to unlock the door (and then have it autolock behind you as soon as you close it). If you lose your Goji-paired phone, don't sweat--contact Goji via phone or their website and they'll transfer access to a phone of your choice. Very considerate for those moments when your phone is "stolen" by large bodies of water or nasty collisions with the ground.

Instead of giving out duplicate keys for guests, the Goji app lets you send access via text message and set up temporary or recurring access time frames. Plus, you'll get text updates when a person unlocks the door (and files a log of unlocks--kids coming home late, beware). But the absolute number-one best feature is a camera in the front lock that sends a photo to your phone when somebody approaches the door.

Though their successful Indiegogo campaign is over, you can still preorder a Goji for $245. They expect to ship next March.

7. Nest Protect

College dormers and small apartment-dwellers, rejoice: The Nest Protect smoke alarm will save your bacon if you have a tendency to burn the bacon and wake everyone up with a screeching smoke alarm. Before the Nest Protect goes DEFCON 1, it kindly speaks in a human voice and alerts you of smoke (and where it's coming from) or a carbon monoxide leak. To dismiss, simply wave at the Nest device. Presto! You remain safe and your roommates remain allies. The Nest Protect will run you $129--but really, what price is safety and comfort worth?

8. WeMo Baby/Withings Baby Monitor

Both of these are of the "well, just to be sure" school of parenting, with the WeMo Baby (left, $69.99) connected to your Wi-Fi and accessible via smartphone app, while the Withings Baby Monitor (right, $249.99) has a 3-megapixel camera that you can view and control via iPhone.

9. Sound!

Alright, Bluetooth speakers are here to stay--but the Z-wave and Zigbee speakers have yet to arrive, meaning you'll need to bridge your Bluetooth or Wi-Fi-broadcasting speakers to access them via a central hub--or just connect to them directly on your smartphone/tablet/computer like a peasant. Luckily, Bluetooth speakers abound, like the bizarre iboxstyle Twist, above.

The alternative is to just listen to your tunes through an Enblink-connected Google TV, as we listed above. Alas for simplicity.

10. Beddit

At the intersection of our greatest obsessions--technology and sleep--lie myriad devices that are promising to achieve "superior" rest by warping your sleep cycle. Slow your roll, technomancer--let's just start with a device that tracks our sleep patterns and tells us what we might be doing wrong. Beddit, a bed-mounted sensor strip paired with an app, raised 400% of its $80,000 Indiegogo goal and retails for $149, giving you all the crazy sleep data you can wrap your head around. Seriously, it's called ballistocardiography, and it's sensitive enough to measure the mechanical forces of a person's heartbeat (along with when you shift in your sleep).

Okay, we'll fess up--this isn't programmable, but in a world where your smarthome senses motion, humidity, and temperature, biometric data is sadly lacking. With Beddit, you can make informed decisions to better your sleep--and decide when best to program your window shades to rise and your coffee to brew in the morning.

Inside The World Wide Web For Robots

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While fears of rebellion have underlined robot intercommunication since Skynet, that hasn't stopped scientists from developing an open-source world wide web called RoboEarth for robots to learn from each other--the first step toward interdependent robot learning.

A robo-specific Internet has obvious benefits: if one robot has been in a room, that mapping info can be instantly shared with others. Ditto with a person's medical history or even medical procedures. In short, the concept of "cloud robotics" means that a procedure would only need to be taught once for any robot hooked to the network to replicate it. As the BBC reports, the eventual goal is to create a cloud-based database that would operate as a common brain for machines--and best of all, RoboEarth's software components are open source.

And like a smart home, some of the heavy computation can be offloaded to other sources on the network, reducing weight, price, and complexity of robot brains while extending battery life. Further, household robots with different abilities could work as a team using their different mechanical capabilities, whether that means sending the Roomba under the couch to bump out a submerged toy or using multiple robots to lift heavy furniture.

For now, research scientists behind the RoboEarth project are testing a quartet of robots at Eindhoven University. Using a mock hospital environment, the scientists are testing navigation and simple tasks like serving drinks to patients.

RoboEarth began in 2009 with funding from the European Union and developed by scientists from Philips and five universities, including Eindhoven University.

Like any network, RoboEarth would theoretically allow overseers to monitor many user robots at once, which James Barrat, author of the futurist book Our Final Invention, believes would provide a bottleneck to prevent robot malfeasance. In the long term, however, Barrat suggests that RoboEarth might allow robots too much opportunity to learn from each other--and start improving their own software for their digitally nefarious ends.


This Hacker Turned A Raspberry Pi Into Tablet Computer

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Not satisfied with the tablets available on the market? Don't rule out building your own.

Michael Castor, an evangelist for Make magazine's online store Maker Shed, did just that, putting together a Raspberry Pi-based tablet he dubbed the PiPad, complete with a handsome wooden frame that looks professional enough to take through the airport without a second look from the TSA.

"I wanted an all-in-one system that was usable, portable, and Linux based," Castor wrote in a post for Make. "Additionally, it had to look good. Since I wanted to use it on flights, the device couldn't freak out the TSA or the old lady sitting next to me."

Starting with the $40 credit-card-size Raspberry Pi Model B, Castor started putting together parts early last year, finding a Pi-compatible, 10-inch touchscreen from the Malaysian vendor Chalk Electronics. Other parts, which he helpfully listed on his blog, included a Wi-Fi adaptor, a USB hub, and heat sinks for the Pi. A 10,000 milliamp-hour battery keeps the tablet running for about six hours on a charge, and the initial prototype cost about the same as an iPad Mini.

He designed the birch wood case with the Vectric Aspire CAD package, carving it with a CNC router and adding holes for the SD memory card and USB connection. There wasn't room for the Pi's ethernet port, but the rest of the components fit into the case, held in place with a mix of hot glue, foam tape and double-sided tape.

"The display was affixed 'Apple-style' using some crazy strong permanent tape around the inside edge," Castor wrote. "I clamped the battery and screen down and allowed the tape to cure over night to ensure a good bond."

Castor wrote that he hasn't had any issue taking the PiPad on flights--the only attention he got was a compliment from a flight attendant on his choice in movies--and Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton even autographed the tablet's carbon-fiber backing.

The PiPad isn't the first Pi-based tablet--a team from Oracle released plans and software for the $370 Java-powered DukePad last fall--but it may be the fanciest-looking.

Former Salon Editor-In-Chief Will Head This Upscale News Site About Pets

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The Internet was made for (and by) cat people. Compilations like Ultimate Funny Cat Videos have ruled YouTube since its inception, but there may be something deeper here. Articles like this one entitled "Why Do Cats Run The Internet? A Scientific Explanation" explore what New York Times columnist Frank Bruni says is "an era of what might be called animal dignity."

Advancing our collective obsession one step further is The Dodo, an online magazine just launched this week devoted to exploring "our fierce and fraught bond with animals broadly and enthusiastically, from animal testing to the ethical eating movement." The site is backed by the Lerer family--Ken Lerer cofounded The Huffington Post, but this site belongs to his daughter Izzie, who is finishing her PhD at Columbia University studying the impact of animal and human interactions.

The Dodo's premiere homepage includes an article by Arianna Huffington, "On the Importance of Appreciating Animals," a post titled, "Justin Bieber's Monkey is Doing Fine (No Thanks to the Biebs)," and, of course, "Maru is the Viral Cat We Can Really Celebrate."

The site is riding the coattails of the success of last year's documentary Blackfish that detailed SeaWorld's ill-treated killer whales, as well as Hillary and Chelsea Clinton's well-documented fight against elephant ivory-poaching.

The CEO and editor-in-chief isKerry Lauerman, former editor-in-chief of Salon. A close friend of Bruni's, Lauerman explained that the motivation behind The Dodo was that, "there's this growing obsession with animal cognition. We don't want animals just for comfort. We really want to know them."

There are plenty of animal meme sites out there, but none as highbrow as this. Combining the world's infatuation with animals and actual scientific investigation into their cute little proclivities, The Dodo could be a viable contender.

Dogecoin Is Now More Popular Than All Other Cryptocurrencies Combined

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A diligent redditor has pointed out that there are more Dogecoin (soft 'g') transactions than all other cryptocoins combined. At the time of writing, Bitcoin, Litecoin--gaining attention as Bitcoin's cheap alternative--Peercoin, and six of the most popular crypocurrencies (there are more than 70) average 3,061 transactions per hour, while Dogecoin trades an hourly average of 3,894. That's more than 93,000 per day.

For the uninitiated, Doge is a dog meme that you had better read up on here. The currency standard was built by a programmer out of Portland and marketing specialist out of Sydney immortalizing the insightful Shiba Inu dog, below, which has become the patron saint of the Doge meme.

Dogecoin didn't even exist before this past December. On December 8, its first day of trading, there were nearly 5,000 unique Dogecoin transactions, which was less than 10 percent of Bitcoin. Dogecoin surpassed Bitcoin trading on December 16, and by December 20, Dogecoin peaked just shy of 200,000 transactions, a weeklong increase of 935 percent.

To those now considering following the doge: The market value is probably not what you're looking for. The latest Dogecoins were traded at about $0.00030, a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's $821 valuation.

Confusingly, there are about 5,000,000,000 more Dogecoins being traded than there are Dogecoins in circulation, and mining will cap at 100,000,000,000. Its market popularity was legitimized right around Christmas, when hackers took off with 21 million coins from the Dogewallet. There's a subreddit for trading and news, another for policing scams. There's a Dogecoin Foundation to promote the use of the cryptocurrency, the actual practicality of which has been seen as dubious by economists.

So how come you haven't heard of it? Carl Miller, writing for Wired, says there will be many more cryptocurrencies coming soon to crowd out Bitcoin:

I confidently predict that the number of cryptocurrencies that are regularly traded and used will radically grow. Their exchange with each other is also likely to grow more intensive and seamless. We might end up habitually using dozens of currencies without noticing, as super-fast transactions allow us to move our money into the currency we need at that time. You might quickly exchange the sexcoins you have left over from last night into bitcoins to pay your freelance designer, devcoins to make a contribution to her open-source project, and a childcoin so your kid can browse amazon whilst they wait.

For as little as people understand the system, it might be time to take this meme's power more seriously. For more on the history of Dogecoin, check out this writeup from DailyTech.

[Image via Kabuso]

Our Brains Map in a Mental Number Line

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Typically people don't see a gray area when it comes to numbers; you either get them or you don't. But new research says our brains are actually systematically designed to handle numerals.

According to Scientific American, humans inherently look at numbers and file them in a mental "number line"--with one side of the brain "responding to small numbers, the adjacent region to larger numbers, and so on, with numeric representations increasing to the far end."

Consider the instance where you are checking out of the supermarket in the "15 items or less" lane and the woman in front of you has a hefty cart of groceries containing way more than allotted for the speedy check-out line. Without counting, you have determined that this woman's groceries surpass 15 and the approach to ascertaining that conclusion utilized a numeric map in your brain. In essence, you have perceived numerosity using a numeric brain map, which is the foundation for your arithmetic skills.

Researchers concluded that our numerical deduction skills are comparable to the way we process senses: Previous studies have shown that humans absorb visual or auditory features and organize them topographically. And while we may process numbers and sensory input similarly, separate parts of the brain are enlisted for arithmetic functions, which are language-dependent. Quantity-based judgments like the ones explored in the "number line" theory are language-independent, which has led researchers to conclude that our numeric consumption may be as innate as hearing.

The stipulation that our brains map abstract information is not necessarily new. But it does open the dam on the unquantifiable maps that may actually be hidden in our brains.

The Value Of Good Old-Fashioned Blue Links

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Should you design your site's aesthetic around the ideas that all hyperlinks should be blue and underlined? A new post over on Search Engine Land points out a few reminders for creating links that offer the best user experience, including making them blue and underlined.

Formatting your site's links isn't just about the color, but also how they function. If you've ever helped someone without much technical experience navigate the Internet, you understand what Erin Everhart means about users feeling safe with the back button. Links that open new windows or new tabs can be disorienting for some, or just annoying for advanced users. The back button is a linear guiding rail in their navigation for many novice users. To some, the web moves forward or backward, and anything else makes your site hard to use.

Marco Arment recently weighed in on opening links in new windows--spoiler--he hates them. It started with him calling out The Verge for its use of new window links, primarily for what he suspects as a way to keep visitors on the site longer. For tasks related to banking or commerce, Arment says a new window might be acceptable, worth the interruption, but for almost everything else, using target="_blank" isn't okay.

What Everhart really stresses is knowing your site's visitors. Is it a mainstream site or is it more technical? Is it all text articles, or is there another reason someone may need a new window? Also keep in mind that even though there wasn't a specific reason Sir Tim Berners-Lee chose blue as the default link color, it's one of the colors that most people can distinguish the best, even if they're colorblind.

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