5 Intriguing Things
1. Portland legalizes Airbnb, essentially.
"Portland will start issuing permits for its first legal short-term rental operations in private homes as soon as September. The Portland City Council on Wednesday gave its OK for Portlanders to rent out one or two bedrooms in their home over-the-counter, $180 permit after an inspection and notifying neighbors. The city Bureau of Development Services, which will oversee the permitting and inspection program, said it's expecting to start issuing permits Sept. 2. More information on how to apply for a permit would likely be posted online before then, said enforcement manager Mike Liefeld. 'We have to strike a balance between inn how we accommodate commerce, including this new kind, and our great neighborhoods,' said Mayor Charlie Hales."
2. Who doesn't love a good rogue wave story? And this one is particularly good.
"That rogue waves are, at base, mathematical objects has meant that sailors, then scientists, have been slow to grasp their nature. Late into the 19th century, the line between sailors’ lore and science could be as blurred as a fog-bound horizon, with reputable journals routinely reporting on the sightings of 'monsters of the sea.' By the mid-20th century, though, most of these monsters had been dispelled or explained—but not rogue waves, which continue to be misidentified and incompletely understood today. Even one of civilization’s most famous waves, Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, is often misinterpreted as a tsunami—the woodcut has even been used as the symbol of a UNESCO tsunami warning sign—when it is actually most likely, as several scholars have argued, to be a rogue wave."
3. Hmm... I don't think The New Yorker is generally considered part of the "deep web."
"It was only four days after that report that Ronan Farrow cited the use of the deep web technology in the reporting of another story, 'The Tower of David,' that aired on his show Feb. 28. It was about an abandoned building in Venezuela that has become the world's tallest slum. 'We can do this thanks to an exclusive collaboration with a startup media company called Vocativ,' Farrow said before the segment played. 'Remember Vocativ's technology penetrates the deep web which can't be reached with traditional search engines. So sit back and take a look at the people we found with those tools in the world's tallest slum.' But several sources told Capital that the idea for the 'Tower of David' report came to chief content officer Noah Kotch, a former senior producer of The Today Show (who left Vocativ in June) after he read an article about the tower in The New Yorker."
4. How not to design a gun-tracking system.
"It turns out there are three databases meant to track the small arms, which include rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers and shotguns. One is a Defense Department listing of all those shipped from the United States. The second is a Defense Department listing of all those received in Afghanistan. They rely heavily on the serial numbers of the arms. But these numbers must be entered manually, and the two databases — one showing shipments and one showing receipts — are inexplicably not linked together. The results are not pretty: Of the 474,823 serial numbers recorded in the second database, for example, 203,888 had missing information or were duplicates, according to the report by Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko."
5. Why does a visual bookmarking site need a a bunch of Google Search engineers?
"And if you’re Google and you’re trying to index that world of information, you’re really great at text because that’s what the code on the Internet does. It marks up text. But if you want to get at objects or the things on web pages, we think you need humans to go in and do that for you. So we think of Pinterest some days as this crazy human indexing machine. Where millions and millions of people are hand indexing billions of objects—30 billion objects—in a way that’s personally meaningful to them."
+ Also, 75 percent of their usage is mobile. 75%!
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
'cello. Being now much commoner than violin-cello, it might well do without its apostrophe.
+ However, 'cello as an abbreviation for limoncello would be totally appropriate.
Crazy Human Indexing Machine