How Many Web Sites Are There?

It's a guess, really, but trends and data available say that there is roughly one web site for every three people who use the web, according to this Washington Post report, which features the graphic shown above (via Internet Live Stats).

Meanwhile, the site WorldWideWebSize says there are 2.39 billion web pages as of today, estimated by the numbers of pages indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo search. The Internet Live Stats estimates there were 1.5 million blog posts today - plus one, this one you are reading right now.

While these stats don't tell us just what is on all the pages (cats? porn? advertising?). 

Every day the visualizations of so many people on the planet are manifest on the Internet. I find it interesting that (according to the above) there are 1.5 billion searches on Google so far today - interesting because that makes it seem that half of the folks in the digital world are seeking something, some information, some photo (some cats, probably).

Email appears to be the most widely used aspect - I sent about 6 today, and likely will send out a dozen more before the day is done.

Capturing the attention of billions is no simple task, especially here on this humble blog, where I noodle about with words and images and ideas. I can usually grab a few hundred views here a day - sometimes more, sometimes less. Big numbers land here mostly when I link to an oddity or a bit of someone else's hostility or such. 

But I do perceive a few things in all these numbers - people have joyfully abandoned publishers and broadcasters to share every kind of thing imaginable. It has been and continues to be liberating - for the cost of obtaining Internet access and some device to access the Internet, anyone can reach global distribution. 

And still, after only 20 some years of such new technology, we are only at the edge of what is going to happen due to this massive shift in human interaction.

I often wonder what might happen if, as in some cheesy story, all that access was suddenly gone, never to return. 

I often wonder if over the next fifty years people will somehow master this wild and wooly digital world, or if such mastery is even possible (mastery meaning that the majority of users add something to this digital conversation that is beyond rude-boy antics and advertising).

I often wonder if the future will steadily erase ideas of borders and countries and race and state and tribe ... what then will follow?

Changing Your Outraged Brain

I'm seldom a fan of the material found in Psychology Today magazine. But I noted an article this week about words and the physical effects words have on our brains and bodies.

Negative words flood the brain and body with chemicals and emotions and studies indicate the brain and body react to one negative word while a positive word has to be repeated to create similar impacts.

There are recent discussions about the apparent rise in what's being called the "Outrage Industry", as daily and hourly we see and hear stories and events which are meant to evoke powerful emotions. Some might say the public is addicted to outrage.

Way back in the mid-90s, I knew a fellow who listened every day to 6 or 7 hours of angry radio rantings from Boortz and Limbaugh and others. Day after day after day, he became sullen and angry and just plain mean. For him the world was an Us versus Them place locked in a holy war. I found it quite sad to watch him devolve into a hating machine. He became physically ill, and nearly died.

The article noted above indicates that while our brains react immediately to negative words to combat danger. A positive word, a Yes, does not do that. One researcher says a person needs 3 or 5 Yeses to equal the effects of one No.

It's very easy to drown in the oceans of outrage, some folks constantly bellow about The End of Everything.

And while negative commentary on our shared worlds can be found in abundance in the posts here on my blog, I've tried to balance that with the positive or humorous or even the silly.

So what follows is nothing less than an effort to add to the positive. Read the list of words below. You can even say them out loud and effect even more powerful change, and if others hear you, that change will spread. You can repeat this act every day too. Ready?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Your Own FOMO Makes You Twerk

Such immense fun this week seeing "news" readers and parents and noobs saying "Twerk", it's sooo 2010.

Even the folks at the Oxford Dictionary have gone all "Ball of Fire", hustling slang onto their pages, apparently due to their own FOMO (fear of missing out).

Some Wordsmiths, including me, go squee when slang hits the masses. Here's my advice: Don't derp at the omnishambles. 

Schools Want Some Words Banned From Tests

Sticks and stones may hurt your bones but words cause permanent damage.

 -- from Talk Radio

The NYC school systems issued a memo to the makers of standardized tests for students in which they urge the banning of some 50 words deemed potentially offensive/distracting to students.

Words and phrases can be both intense and meaningless depending on usage, and surely one could find an enormous amount of variance if the public at large were asked to define the word "education" or to assess the quality of 'standardized testing".

The Staten Island Online notes: "... certain words can elicit unpleasant feelings on the part of students. "Dinosaur," for example, would suggest evolution -- offensive to creationists. even "birthday" doesn't make the cut because Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate them."

The list: 

• Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological)
• Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs
• Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
• Bodily functions
• Cancer (and other diseases)
• Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
• Celebrities
• Children dealing with serious issues
• Cigarettes (and other smoking paraphernalia)
• Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or library setting)
• Crime
• Death and disease
• Divorce
• Evolution
• Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
• Gambling involving money
• Halloween
• Homelessness
• Homes with swimming pools
• Hunting
• Junk food
• In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
• Loss of employment
• Nuclear weapons
• Occult topics (i.e. fortune-telling)
• Parapsychology
• Politics
• Pornography
• Poverty
• Rap Music
• Religion
• Religious holidays and festivals (including but not limited to Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan)
• Rock-and-Roll music
• Running away
• Sex
• Slavery
• Terrorism
• Television and video games (excessive use)
• Traumatic material (including material that may be particularly upsetting such as animal shelters)
• Vermin (rats and roaches)
• Violence
• War and bloodshed
• Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
• Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.


Fun Assignment: make a 'test question' using as many of the words on this list as you can!! Share it in the comments section!!

UPDATE: Phantom has the winning entry in  the comments below:

"If a train loaded with weapons, pornography, and a group of Wiccans celebrating Halloween by drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes is going east at 50 mph, and it passes another train loaded with vermin, junk food, and nuclear weapons going west at 65 mph, how many homes with swimming pools will the trains pass before the Jewish engineer and the Baptist brakeman on the first train turn on some rap music and have sex while talking dirty about evolution, and the former NFL Hall of Fame lineman on the second train starts telling fortunes and predicting which passengers on the train are going to die in a natural disaster?

Please show your work."

New Words/Phrases of 2011

In no particular order, a short selection of words of phrases which became prominent this year and will likely become more commonly used in 2012.

biopiracy - I'm betting this word (along with bioprospecting) gets more widely used in coming years. It became prominent in news reports and press releases regarding a massive lawsuit brought against the agricultural mega-corporation Monsanto by the nation of India, which claims Monsanto is "stealing" plants indigenous to India and slightly modifying the plant genetics in hopes of getting a patent on them and then cornering the market on supply. More info here.

underdemolished - I encountered this one several times in 2011, used in reference to the existing buildings of say, a bankrupt restaurant chain, which continue to operate despite barely covering costs - it isn't that there is an over-supply of buildings, it's just that the ones that are in use are "underdemolished". Also used to describe the glut of over-valued homes no one wants to buy.

tebowing - From the world of football, this is a verb describing the act of dropping to one knee to pray in a public event or location. (See Tim Tebow for more info.)

smartphone - I'm pretty sure I never heard this word prior to 2011. It annoys me. And I hope it soon goes the way of the "velocipede".

web curation - Instead of telling someone I write a blog or maintain a web site or write for web sites, I now can claim to be a 'web curator', which sounds mighty fancy and pays just the same as I make now.

ambush marketing - While it seems a redundant phrase, it refers to the way a company can piggy-back their logo onto events and services they do not sponsor but can simply invade. It's being rather common in describing the advertising orgy surrounding the 2012 London Olympics.

planking - Probably the most fun word of the year, the most ironic fad and something anyone can do anywhere, also known as the "lying down game". You can even mix together planking with tebowing and get this:

Publisher's Shameful Censorship of 'Huckleberry Finn'

An Alabama-based publisher is making news as their new edition of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" will be censored to remove what they call "hurtful epithets" and to halt "preemptive censorship" of Twain's novel. But the motive is most likely to A.) get publicity and B) sell books.

So no use of the word "injun" and the word "slave" will replace the word most often referred to today as the "n-word". It's a cheap shot at fame or infamy from the publisher, NewSouth Books, which offers a defense here and even has a blog on their actions here.

"We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers. Twain’s two books do not deserve ever to join that list of literary “classics” he once humorously defined as those “which people praise and don’t read,” yet the long-lofty status of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn has come under question in recent decades. In this connection, it seems relevant to remember that Twain habitually read aloud his day’s writings to an audience gathered on the porch of his summer retreat overlooking Elmira, New York, watching and listening for reactions to each manuscript page. He likewise took cues about adjusting his tone from lecture platform appearances, which provided him with direct responses to his diction. As a notoriously commercial writer who watched for every opportunity to enlarge the mass market for his works, he presumably would have been quick to adapt his language if he could have foreseen how today’s audiences recoil at racial slurs in a culturally altered country."

Wrong.

The assumption is that the novels are fundamentally flawed. And it's likewise sad to see educated people and publishers embrace censorship rather than scholarship. By dropping the language the publishers remove and reconstruct the history and the themes of the book, which focused a laser-sharp attention on prejudice and the destruction that prejudice leveled at our nation.

Claims that the changes will halt the books from being banned, to allow for more school-age youngsters to read the books are deceitful. Any Twain scholar worth a dime can offer up Twain's own response to censorship of his work and his response to allowing children to read his works:

"I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave."

Such a deft handling of idiotic worries of so-called community standards.

Another defense of the censorship - strike that - another defense of changing the entire meaning of the novel claims:

"New South is simply giving educators and other readers the option of enjoying Twain's work without tripping over a derogatory term, especially one coming from its hero."

Wrong. The derogatory worldview Twain presents is precisely what he wanted readers to confront. If you remove the challenging language, what's left? A light-hearted romp across the countryside? If the characters don't address the reality that many in America at that time viewed Jim as sub-human just because of his skin color, then the book's meaning is gutted. If a teacher wants students to read Twain's work absent it's meaning and context, then what is it exactly they are teaching?

And one more note for these alleged "scholars" about what kids today read or are capable of comprehending - the top bestselling Young Adult book last year? The Hunger Games: a futuristic tale where the government selects a boy and a girl from various districts to fight to the death on live TV.

What is a 'Pringle'? A Chip or Not A Chip?

The Supreme Court of Judicature in Britain has ruled on the legal question of "Is a Pringle a potato chip?

"With citations ranging from Baroness Hale of Richmond to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lord Justice Robin Jacob concluded that, legally, it is a potato chip.

The decision is bad news for Procter & Gamble U.K., which now owes $160 million in taxes. It is good news for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — and for fans of no-nonsense legal opinions. It is also a reminder, as conservatives begin attacking Judge Sonia Sotomayor for not being a “strict constructionist,” of the pointlessness of labels like that.

In Britain, most foods are exempt from the value-added tax, but potato chips — known as crisps — and “similar products made from the potato, or from potato flour,” are taxable. Procter & Gamble, in what could be considered a plea for strict construction, argued that Pringles — which are about 40 percent potato flour, but also contain corn, rice and wheat — should not be considered potato chips or “similar products.” Rather, they are “savory snacks.”

---

"The Supreme Court of Judicature had little patience with Procter & Gamble’s lawyerly attempts to break out of the potato chip category. The company argued that to be “made of potato” Pringles would have to be all potato, or nearly so. If so, Lord Justice Jacob noted, “a marmalade made using both oranges and grapefruit would be made of neither — a nonsense conclusion.” He was even more dismissive of Procter & Gamble’s argument that to be taxable a product must contain enough potato to have the quality of “potatoness.” This “Aristotelian question” of whether a product has the “essence of potato,” he insisted, simply cannot be answered."

This is what courts are for, I suppose.

But no Pringle I have ever munched upon ever reached the level of potato chip, according to my taste buds.

SEE ALSO: The patent on Pringles.

A Clean, Well-Written Argument

Simplicity is praised and inner thoughts revealed by the nation's Supreme Court Justices in a series of video interviews which have been made available on the internet.

The growing popularity of those videos and the comments made on them were featured in a recent article from Law.com (click here for their story). Some samples:

"Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., for example, thinks lengthy citations to Web sites that are now common in briefs are an "obscene" distraction "with all those letters strung together," though he does not offer an alternative. Another bias: Roberts thinks the word "which" should be avoided almost every time. "It slows me down; it starts to sound like one of those old 19th century contracts -- ‘which' and ‘wherefore.'"

Justice Stephen Breyer seconds that emotion. "If I see [a brief that is] 50 pages, it can be 50 pages, but I'm already going to groan." On the other hand, he says, "If I see 30, I think, well, he thinks he has really got the law on his side because he only took up 30."

Justice Anthony Kennedy, it turns out, hates when lawyers turn nouns into verbs by tacking on "-ize" at the end, as in "incentivize." Such showy, made-up words, he sniffs, are "like wearing a very ugly cravat."

And Justice Antonin Scalia can't stand it when briefs refer to a precedent "and its progeny." He growls, "I think it was wonderful the first time it was used. It is trite now. Terribly trite. Get some other expression."

Typographical errors are a credibility killer, Scalia adds. "My goodness, if you can't even proofread your brief, how careful can I assume you are" in citing relevant cases?

Scalia also thinks that lawyers are wasting their time when they write a summary of their argument at the beginning of a brief. "I mean, why would I read the summary if I'm going to read the brief? Can you tell me why I should read it?"

But if you skip the summary to please Scalia, you risk annoying Justice Clarence Thomas. He tells Garner the summary section is the most important part, acting as a preview "like giving you, you know, what's going to be on TV next week."

A Different Standard for Imus?

The media again covers a minor story until it becomes a major story, but is reporting on what Don Imus said about the Rutger's basketball team more than a celebrity-gone-crazy-bad story? Is he being held to a far different standard for word choice? If he was so grossly out of bounds, how is that the public, or at least the media, constantly gives a pass and a wink and a nod to the likes of Ann Coulter?

Her career-long nastiness and virulence gets an occasional news report, and she has lost outlets and advertisers in recent months for her lowbrow name calling. Most news outlets, for instance, have said little to criticizer her for her column last week as she bemoaned the idea that the genoicide in Darfur is taking too long. As if some more efficent and quicker efforts were used to kill the millions there would be a better thing.

"These people can't even wrap up genocide. We've been hearing about this slaughter in Darfur forever - and they still haven't finished. The aggressors are moving like termites across that country. It's like genocide by committee. Who's running this holocaust in Darfur, FEMA? This is truly a war in which we have absolutely no interest."

Her take on Imus? According to her, Imus should be praised for being "the only person who watches women's basketball."

Hell, even I watch women's basketball. A massive thunderstorm knocked out my reception for the UT-Rutgers match-up, sadly, but I did watch most of the UT-NC game and it was as intense a game as I've ever seen.

News Hounds reports on the odd disconnect as Coulter goes on (where else) the FOX Network to say Imus is apologizing too much. Others, I noticed this morning, are also asking much of the same questions about the constant media pass handed to Coulter.

I do think that Imus, with his program offered via television on MSNBC, has a far larger audience than Coulter has ever had, so perhaps that's why he is on the roasting spit du jour.