Trailer Park Hillbillionaires

For the love of God, PLEASE listen with volume on!

Elon plays a mean banjo. Count how many different versions of the stars-and-bars Zuckerberg wears on his t-shirts!

And yes, this video was created by generative AI but reddit didn't provide any additional details. 

The Trailer Park Hillbillionaires
by u/johnpershing in aivideo

How many hillbillionaires can YOU count?

I'm unsure if the one standing at a distance, toward the end, is Warren Buffet or not. I thought Bill Gates with the jar of bugs is hilarious.

Plane malfunction illusion: Rolling shutter effect

Chris wanted to take a photo while on an airplane flight. The aircraft was a Bombardier Q400. Chris didn't have a camera with him, only his Apple iPhone 3GS. The scanning order of his iPhone sensor combined with the light refracted from the airplane window caused a distinctive "detaching blades" phenomenon in the photo. Rotating the camera warps the blades in different directions.

Edit: Unfortunately for me, Chris is no longer sharing his photos online, but I have found others. Keep reading!

Bombardier Q400 digression

Q400 passenger airplane by The Cranky Flier on Flickr

There have been some serious safety concerns with the Bombardier Dash Q400 Turboprop. Persistent problems with faulty landing gear received plenty of media coverage. Also, landing gear failure is highly noticeable to passengers! Some of the worry is depicted by The Cranky Flyer in the little drawing.

Although there have been no passenger injuries, thanks to pilot skill, multiple instances of left or right wheels failing to extend fully (or at all!) upon landing have occurred in Canada, the United States, and France. Those are the markets for Bombardier's small-to-medium sized commercial and business aircraft.

Engine stalls in very cold weather, due to ice, is another issue with the Q400. Both the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Canadian air safety regulators launched formal inquiries.

Despite the appearance of Jason's photo below, there have never been any problems with Q400 propellers blades detaching and falling off while in flight!

Blades by Jason Mullins on Flickr

Decline of Web 2.0

In a prior post, I wrote about a whimsical 1870s era cartographic depiction of America as a Young Hog. The source publication from which I first learned of it, University of Michigan's Map Library blog, has since been discontinued. I shouldn't be surprised, even though it makes me feel sad.

Web 2.0 is user-contributed content

Blogs, Huffington Post and Forbes per-pageview paid contributors, BuzzFeed, Second Life, YouTube, image sharing services, question-and-answer sites, and comment sections (for online newspapers as well as blogs) are examples of user-created online content. It is difficult to believe that Technorati tracked millions of active blogs at one point in time. User-contributed content sites seem to have been in decline for years.

Technorati was considered an authoritative source for blog activity. It was before my time, but sounded great, even including a blog search engine that was superior to Google's blog search. Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.

Blog growth outpaces Moore's Law?!

That's what Technorati claimed in 2005: Blog growth was frequently doubling. The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general, see "A new blog created every second"! Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was still a lot of Internet hype then.

In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. New blog count was doubling every six months! That's analogous to the real Moore's Law, applicable to technology, not blogs. 

Moore's Law isn't a law of physical science, but rather, a rule of thumb based on the observation that semiconductor processor speeds double every six months. (Moore's Law hasn't held up so well due to the physical limitations: there are only so many nanometers of room on processor chips.)  There's more to read about Moore's Law here including a link to Gordon Moore's original article about it. 

Technorati landing page

With such amazing growth, it wouldn't be long before blogs outnumbered Earth's adult population!