“It is not some kind of contingent disappointment that physics and biology have not discovered dutyons mixed in somewhere with the bosons and protons, or failed to detect the Rights Field generated by the human body…” — All Ethics Are Secular Ethics
“In very simplified terms, it is currently understood that, initially, possibly only energy was present. Then this energy started to partially change into mass, forming first quarks and electrons (mostly). Then heavier particles. Finally, once the universe cooled down a bit more, the first atoms started to form through the aggregation of the particles. It is calculated that atoms would be split between hydrogen and helium with a 3:1 ratio - these are the two lightest atoms.” — Physics Stack Exchange: Where does matter come from?
“We want to free ships within a short period of time instead of keeping them for a long time and incurring more expenses in guarding them. We have to free them at a lower ransom so that we can hijack more ships.” — Reuters: Somali pirates cut ransoms to clear hijacked ships via Freakonomics
“The difference isn’t over the taxes owed, but over who should be sending them to the state. You might not know this, but if you buy something that’s taxable in Texas, you owe the taxes whether the seller collects them from you or not. That’s true for over-the-counter sales, mail-order sales or online sales. It’s called the use tax, and it’s the state’s levy on purchases from companies that don’t have a physical presence, or “nexus,” in Texas.” — The Texas Tribune: Texas Comptroller Hunts Amazon for Tax Money
“I wonder therefore if we wouldn’t make more environmental progress if we stopped pretending that battling climate change was a nice favor we might choose to do an anthropomorphized planet and instead appealled more directly to people’s self-interest in themselves and their descendents surviving into the future.” — The Reality-Based Community: The Truth about Climate Change
Strange Maps: How the West Wasn’t Won
“It’s disrespectful to let writing’s constituent elements bleed into one another through imprecise demarcations. If you see me “making mistakes with comma placement”, please rest assured that I’m doing it deliberately. In most cases the comma doesn’t belong to the phrase delimited by the quotation marks that enclose it. Placing an exclamation point or question mark to the left or right of a close-quote is a weighty decision! That we violate the atomic purity of quotations with injected commas is an outrage.” — Manifest Density: everyone has a right to their beliefs
“[Stores] should make a single line feed multiple cashiers. For three cashiers its about three times faster than having a line for each cashier. Here’s why: In the single line/single cashier set-up any delay - like a price check - stops the line completely. In contrast when a line feeds to multiple cashiers it’s likely that only one of the three customers in front of you will have a delay - because recall that in Erlang’s model delays and events are distributed randomly - and that means a register will likely be open.” — Engineer Guy: Why the other line is more likely to move faster
“As I mention in the video, what’s really interesting is that this locksmith was penalized for getting better at his profession.” — Dan Ariely: Locksmiths
Gruber’s sentiment is right on:
Most bookmarking tools — the ones built into web browsers, and bookmarklets for third-party apps — do use the page title as the default bookmark name. Tools that help people tweet links to articles use the page title as the default description. So make titles useful. Write them for humans, not search engine spiders.
His technical arguments about whether SEO keyword junk “works” are suspect, but that’s beside the point. What we have here is a tragedy of the commons: some sites realize that by optimizing their HTML document titles for machines, they gain a short-term tactical advantage over their competitors. Never mind that those titles are now substantially less useful for the people who try to use them.
Trust the Googlebot to figure it out.
Don’t trust. Expect. If indeed stuffing the document title full of keyword junk does improve search engine ranking, that is a bug with the search engines. Keyword junk is an exploit, not a strategy. Search engines should do a better job inferring relevance from human optimized content and stop encouraging sites who waste our time and attention.
Yes, it’s a hard problem. That’s why it’s interesting.