admin

Sep 16 2007
0

How big is a photon?

Posted by | science | No Comments

How big is a photon? When information is readily available, as it is with an Internet connection, finding it through means such as a search engine can often be about asking the right question. How big is a photon, ends up being one of those rabbit hole questions that causes a computer screen to fill up with scads of information and no real answer. Its a nice little info bomb to prove how inadequate the standard interpretations of physics’ amazingly accurate Standard Model are. Have a read of some of the answers below: How big is a photon and what does it look and behave like?

Read More
Aug 29 2007
0

OObject launches.

Posted by | diary | No Comments

OObject the latest Wists site launches today. Oobject is a gadget blog, but with a difference. Instead of posts, there are ‘charts’ constantly updated image galleries with the best items in each category, voted on by users. As usual, the focus is or quirky, unusual or well designed lists of things. OObject is a bit like Billboard charts for gadgets. OObject is a major leap forward in terms of the way our sites work as it completely couples the wists publishing system into a customized version of WordPress, and uses the new editorial back-end of wists for management.

Read More
Aug 28 2007
0

How to setup a cheap Infinite Disk system using S3 without having to use EC2

Posted by | half baked ideas | No Comments

How to setup a cheap Infinite Disk system using S3 without having to use EC2. I don’t normally post technical stuff on my blog, but I’m putting this up because I think it might help others. Wists images are stored in the file system with filenames based upon a hash of their url (principally). This keeps the db small (overloading the directories is prevented by creating subdirectory structures based upon the first few letters of the hash (/b/c/bc267867 etc.) We want to use Amazon for reliability and unlimited storage, but we need to couple the system to application logic (and our code isn’t multi-treaded), so a straightforward S3 use isn’t possible. The problem with S3 at the moment is all to do with latency. We don’t want to have to manipulate and store wists thumbnails remotely on an EC2 instance, but if we do it locally then there will be…

Read More
Aug 24 2007
0

Atheist Societies Better Off

Posted by | religion | No Comments

“high levels of organic atheism [not government coerced] are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality.” Interestingly, the US is 4-5 times more religious than Israel. Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns

Read More
Aug 22 2007
0

At the peak of the Japanese real estate bubble, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California.

Posted by | diary | No Comments

According to the Global House Prices blog: “At the peak of the Japanese real estate bubble, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California”. Looking at the graph of US and Japanese Real estate prices is sobering, the US one is like a ski slope and the Japanese one, a mountain. But none of this seems to make sense to us Brits. Housing in America still seems cheap, by UK standards, even in New York. Consider that the average house price across the whole of the UK, not just the expensive bits, is over $400,000. The fact that I could barely afford to buy back the building that I bought in my 20s, despite having earned much more than most, since, means that something is fundamentally out of whack in the UK and by an order of magnitude that is much larger than in…

Read More
Aug 13 2007
0

Eyeless and Gaga. Why we are reducing the number of users on Wists

Posted by | diary | No Comments

Wists users continue to rise, and monthly uniques are around the 350K mark, but our Alexa is dropping and deliberately so. The reason is that we have decided to ruthlessly cull spam users, which account for a large number on many social shopping sites and social networks. Social network spam doesn’t tend to be that visible since the items on front pages and showcased category links (top items etc.) of many social websites are hand picked by editors or users. But do a search for high value Adsense terms within many user generated sites and you will see that the automated publishing tools have blasted them, creating useless ballast that companies are reluctant to get rid of since it generates organic search engine traffic, and makes the numbers look good. Since the type of spam we get is SEO spam and a greater percentage of these people use Alexa toolbars…

Read More
Aug 07 2007
0

Market Crash Imminent

Posted by | predictions | No Comments

The Stock Market is about to crash, soon. If you think that this won’t affect the mini tech bubble, get ready for your adsense revenues to halve in the six months following. I suspect, however, that this crash will be bad enough to make things like that mere ‘trifles’. FSU Editorial: “2007 Market Crash” by Greg Silberman 07/26/2007

Read More
Jul 31 2007
0

The business model for the web.

Posted by | predictions | No Comments

Web businesses will succeed based upon their competitive advantage in acquisition of the finite resource of attention. The quantitative measure of this will be the cost per bit, where the cost is the acquisition cost per user divided by the amount of time and therefore the number of potential transmittable ‘bits’ the users’ attention is captured for. Traditional economics is based upon the notion of scarcity. But this scarcity tends to be relevant only in the production, not the consumption of things. This is because the cost per unit of consumable energy, or more generally, information – the bits consumed per bit delivered is usually very high. As an example, the number of bits of information in the atoms that make up a book is much higher than the atoms that store the book in digital form on a computer. Because of this, the cost of duplicating a computer file…

Read More