“February 20, 1962: The USA launches John Glenn into Earth orbit. Something America could do fifty years ago… but not today.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
Egyptians really know how to throw a party. A year after the uprising began on January 25, Egyptians have returned to Tahrir Square to demand a transition to civilian governance.
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“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
SOPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act. For all those living under a hole for the last month or so, it is a law that, if passed, has the potential to destroy the internet as we know it. SOPA was created by the House, but the Senate has an equivalent of this law, the PIPA, or Protect IP Act, that has virtually the same provisions as SOPA. In protest of this law, I will be joining Reddit, Cyanide and Happiness, the Cheezburger Network (owners of Fail Blog, Know Your Meme, Memebase, and the like), and potentially Wikipedia in taking down my site on January 18th. Yes, I understand that quite a few of you depend on this website for the very sustenance that keeps you alive and kicking, but I’m sure you can spend one day without constantly and rapidly checking Historically Irrelevant. But enough about me, let’s talk about SOPA and what it does.
What is SOPA?
SOPA, at its core, is a bill designed to clamp down on copyright infringement that is so rampant across the internet. The provisions of the bill allow the US Department of Justice, as well as any holder of copyright that is being infringed upon, to file a court order against those who either a) actually infringe upon the copyrights of the party or b) facilitate said copyright infringement. The actions they could to take, according to the bill, are broad and far reaching. For one, the US government can block a site from dealing with online money management systems such as PayPal, as well as order search engines like Google to remove the site from search results. More drastic still is that SOPA allows for the government to order all US ISPs (Internet Service Providers, ie the guys who provide your internet access like Optimum Online, Comcast, etc.) to block all access to the site.
What’s so bad about SOPA?
The intentions of SOPA are good; internet copyright infringement and piracy are rampant problems that will eventually have to be dealt with. However, the way SOPA goes about trying to solve these problems shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works and what it stands for. First and foremost, it is clear that current copyright laws are not sufficient in the new Internet Age. Intellectual Property is an archaic idea that holds little to no weight in an age of remixes and lightning fast communication. According to current copyright laws, if SOPA passes, then sites like YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and any other site that has user generated content will essentially guarantee its removal from the US Internet. Let’s say that a child decides to cover a song on YouTube. For instance, I’m sure you’ve all seen that adorable video of a small kid playing a cover of Jason Mraz’ “I’m Yours” on ukulele (if you haven’t, watch it here). Thanks to SOPA and the current copyright laws in place, that child would be imprisoned for up to five years for infringing upon copyright, and all of YouTube would be shut down thanks to that one video. Think of all the comedians, musicians, and the like that have come out of YouTube by covering other songs or talking about copyrighted items. If SOPA was in effect a few years ago, we’d have no Smosh, no Epic Rap Battles of History, no Justin Beiber (if that’s a good or bad thing is still in quesiton), and no other YouTube videos at all. YouTube wouldn’t be the only site shut down by the provisions of SOPA, however. Share a photo that was previously copyrighted on Flickr? You go to jail, the whole site gets shut down. Post a video of yourself singing “Friday” on Facebook? You go to jail, the whole site gets shut down. Sell a blanket with R2-D2 on it on Etsy? You go to jail, the whole site gets shut down. You get the picture.
That’s not the only downside of SOPA, however. Not only will sites like YouTube be shut down, but it would be illegal for any US citizen to share a link to YouTube on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Essentially, the US government would be committing internet censorship by prohibiting you from sharing links to certain websites. Moreover, SOPA would stifle and effectively kill any more innovation on the Internet. The legal cost to try and create a site that abides by the provisions laid out in SOPA would be too high for small startups to afford. Likewise, the consortieum angel investors who financed sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, allowing them to survive in their earlier years and morph into the internet giants today, have stated (according to a study conducted by Booz & Company that can be viewed here) that if SOPA is passed, it simply wouldn’t be worth their time to invest in internet companies any more. Essentially, we’d no longer have the potential for another website to come along and enrich our lives. Plus, the vast sums of money companies like Google pump into the US economy would dry up with limited innovation in the internet sphere.
Worst of all, SOPA fails to address or attempt to fix the very reason it was created. SOPA’s stated purpose is to attempt to put an end to internet piracy and copyright infringement. However, all it does is penalize those who aren’t pirating anything in the first place. Sites like YouTube and Tumblr would be taken down for all US visitors, but the way that ISPs block the sites can easily be circumvented by somebody who knows what they’re doing. Because sites like YouTube would still be visible to the rest of the world, all one in the US would have to do is type in YouTube’s IP address in the URL bar of one’s browser rather than YouTube.com to get to the site. Not very hard, right? So SOPA itself is ineffective in blocking sites. Those who know their way around the internet, and those who are pirating bucket loads of content, will be inconvenienced by SOPA, but not much will change in terms of their browsing habits. The people it does hurt are those who are not familiar with the internet and don’t understand what an IP address is. It hurts the grandmother who just wants to talk to her grandchild on Facebook. It hurts the kid who just wants to listen to some music on YouTube.
Who created SOPA?
SOPA was proposed by a few Congressmen in the House, but who in Congress proposed it is unimportant. The real culprits behind the creation of this bill is the motion picture and music industry. Companies like the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) have poured millions upon millions of dollars into both the House and the Senate in an effort to bribe Congressmen to vote for the bill. SOPA helps them, and hurts the rest of us. It represents a fundamental disconnect between the movie and music companies and general society. As the CEO of Valve, Gabe Newell, has stated numerous times, “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.” The reason people pirate goods, at least most of the time, is because it’s simply easier to pirate than to go out to a brick and mortar store to buy a DVD, or download a movie that is riddled with DRM that prevents you from watching it on certain devices. Apple makes a ton of money off of iTunes because it’s easy, Valve makes a lot of money off of Steam because it’s easy, Netflix makes a lot of money because it’s easy. Most record and movie companies fail to see this, and instead come up with laws like SOPA. SOPA represents the entertainment industry’s inability and lack of willingness to innovate.
What can I do?
Email your Congressman and tell them to vote down SOPA. Raise awareness amongst your friends and on the internet. Sign a petition. Visit http://americancensorship.org/.The more people who know about SOPA the better. The Internet is the last true bastion of free speech left on the planet. I refuse to allow the US government, or anybody for that matter, take it away. I hope you’ll join me in voicing your disapproval to Congress, and help to keep the internet free.
Happy 2012 everybody! 2011 has been quite a year, but rather than recap the events of the year, which I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of other sites do countless times over, I’m just going to throw some statistics about my site this year out at you. Why? Well, mostly because I’m a narcissistic bastard who thinks that other people care about how many visitors my site had in 2011. If you don’t care, I’d recommend you leave this post right now. If you do, then prepare yourself for some numbers!
I only started tracking my site on Google Analytics on February 8, so these numbers may be missing a few visitors. Regardless, they’re still interesting. First, let’s start off with the big number: in 2011, Historically Irrelevant had 11,296 unique visitors; that is, individual people who visited the site at least once. That’s a ridiculously high number beyond my wildest dreams. So thanks to everybody who visited! It’s crazy to think that over 11,000 people read at least one of my articles.
Of those 11,296 visitors, 9,088 of them were from the United States. The other 2,208 people came from 107 different countries from every continent except Antarctica. The top 10, from most visitors to least, comprised of:
Quite a list, eh? I’m honored to have visitors from around the world, and hope they keep coming back.
In terms of browser, 5,349 (around 44%) of all visitors used Google Chrome as their browser of choice. I, too, use Chrome (in fact, I’m typing this article in Chrome) and would recommend it above any other browser. Firefox came in second with 31% of all users using it. Internet Explorer and Safari came in third and fourth respectively, with each about 9% of visitors.
For operating system, it was no surprise when Microsoft Windows was used by 66% (8,104) of all users, due to its dominance of the marketplace. It was surprising, however, that it only controlled 66% of the market, at least in terms of visitors to my site. OS X, Apple’s baby, had 24% (2,911) of visitors to the site. In third place, rather than Linux, came the iPad with 4% (431) and Linux in fourth with 3% (374). Rounding out the top five was the iPhone with 2% (219). Mobile devices, specifically Apple products, are slowly but surely chipping away the dominance of desktop based OSes.
With the profile of each individual visitor established, it’s time to see where those visitors are coming from. The top place where people found my site from was Reddit, which netted me 5,229 visitors (46% of all visitors). So, thank you Redditors for visiting my site! In second place comes another discovery site, StumbleUpon, with 2,384 (21%) visitors. Search results from Google came in third place, with 1,231 (11%) visitors. Finally, in fourth and fifth place are the social networking sites that I’ve shared many a link to this site on. Facebook comes in fourth with 763 (7%) visitors. So to all those reading this via Facebook, thanks! In fifth comes Twitter, with 279 (3%) visitors. Again, I thank all my Twitter followers for visiting! In all, 93 different web sites linked to my site, but netted me a lot less followers than these big five. Thanks to all who deemed my site worthy enough of linking to!
We’ve got where these visitors are coming from, where they’re located in the world, and what they’re using to visit my site. Now, let’s see what they’re actually looking at! The top two articles are neck and neck, with the most visited only beating out its opponent by 16 visitors. In first place comes What our legal drugs tell us about our society with 3,886 pageviews, accounting for 27% of all pageviews to the site. The next post narrowly lost the lead with 3,850 pageviews, my post about The street vendor who changed the world also accounted for 27% of pageviews. The next post drops off substantially, for it doesn’t even break the one thousand mark in terms of pageviews. In third place comes The history of contractions with 746 (5%) views. Fourth place was secured by my post about The beautiful game, and why it doesn’t need to be fixed with 530 (4%) views. Rounding out the top five is my post about Why I cried at the end of Bastion, and why I’m not afraid to admit it with 504 (4%) views. Overall, a fairly varied top five most viewed articles.
A great year all around for Historically Irrelevant, one which I’d like to thank you for being a part of. This year, I hope to have some more great articles and intriguing ideas for you to read about, and hope that you’ll join me. Thanks for making 2011 a fantastic year, and help me make 2012 even better!
“If only they enforced bank regulations like they do park rules, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” — Estelle Weyl
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As many of you know, the college football world is currently being rocked by scandal. Coach Joe Paterno of Penn State’s football program has been sacked after allegations of covering up an alleged child molester. The public has almost unanimously approved of the firing, saying that it is morally reprehensible to protect somebody who takes advantage of children. Whilst Paterno did nothing criminally or legally wrong, morally his actions were unforgivable, and I agree that he should have been fired. It sends a message to other people who were thinking about putting the “brand” of a college over the life and mental health of a child. But there is a problem to this logic. There’s a sort of elephant in the room that we all seem to be overlooking. Yes, Paterno should have been sacked for covering up the case of one child molester. But what of a man who has covered up the cases of dozens, maybe even hundreds of child molesters? Surely he, too, should be sacked after a public outcry against his morally wrong actions? Sadly, I am here to report that this is not the case.
The man in question is Pope Benedict XVI. He has helped cover up dozens of priests who have sexually abused small children across the globe. It took him until 2010 to finally put out a policy in the Vatican that priests should report when other priests sexually abuse children, but only if it is the law. In essence, if it is not the law to report sexual abuse, a priest should not do it. Better to deal with the priest inside the Vatican and simply move him to another church than hand him over to the secular authorities. As of writing, the Catholic Church still has no zero-tolerance policy on child abuse. If a child is abused in a country where child abuse isn’t against the law, it’s a non-issue in the Church’s eyes.
So I ask you, why should a religious leader get any different treatment than the coach of a football team? Both have consciously kept mute about child abuse cases (one many more times than the other), yet only one has been sacked whilst the other is revered by almost a billion people worldwide. Please, if somebody could explain to me why this is right and just, I would be eternally grateful.
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” — G. K. Chesterton
Well, we made it. According to UN estimates, the world now holds 7 billion human beings. 7 billion people. And what a journey it’s been. From less than a 15,000 individuals on Earth 70,000 years ago after the Toga supereruption, to 1 billion people in 1806, all the way to today. I just want to take this post to give you an idea of the amount of people we’re talking about here.
In all of human history, there has been around 106 billion people ever born. That means that of all the humans ever alive, 6.7% of them are alive right now. 4 people are born and 2 people die every second. If we took every single human on the face of the Earth and stacked them one on top of another, they’d stretch from the Earth to the moon and back to the Earth 15 times. If I decided to write out 7 billion letters without any spaces in between, I’d have to use a little over 2 million pages of paper. Indeed, what a fantastic journey it’s been.
And yet, there’s still so much of it left. Around 1 billion people worldwide go to bed with a hungry stomach. Almost 3 billion people live on under $2 dollars a day (an even more astounding figure is that to be in the top 1% of the world, in regards to income, you have to earn a measly $34,000 a year). Around 1.5 billion people are illiterate. And sadly, these numbers are only expected to rise. So while we celebrate the triumph of humanity on reaching 7 billion living, let us remember those whose lives are barely livable.
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“The revolution will not be televised. It will, however, be livestreamed.” — Anthony de Rosa
This weekend happened to compose of one more extra day than usual, for we had that archaic “holiday” of Columbus Day off. So, what did I decide to do for those three days of school-less bliss? Attempt to calculate the average distribution of letters in the English language of course! To begin the study, I started off by measuring the amount of letters in this paragraph (you don’t have to actually read this part, just be aware that it’s there):
Language is a particularly curious thing. Why do we write as we do? How did language come to be the way it is? Why are some letters used more than others? It spurns on many questions, most of which I can’t answer. One of them I will attempt, however: what is the distribution of letters in English? So, let’s try and see if we can find out. I will count all the letters present on this page, find their percentages, and graph them. Time for math!
So, with all the letters counted, I created this graph. The x axis is for each letter, and the y axis represents the amount. From a quick glance at the graph, it appears that the top three most used letters, at least in the above paragraph, are “e”, “t,” and “i.” While this is great to know for a paragraph of 347 words, it doesn’t really help much with my overall goal. If I really want to find the average distribution, I’ll have to go much bigger, and by bigger I mean using multiple books.
Of course, there are certain practical problems with using texts of over 500 letters; mainly, the fact that I would have to count each individual letter one by one. Books have at least 50,000 words, let alone letters! To rectify this issue, I decided to write up a simply Java program to count the letters for me. If for some strange reason you want to view the code I used to accomplish this, I humbly direct you to this link.
Now that my letter counting problem was solved, it was time to select the texts I would be using for the program itself. I settled on eight books, two of which would be of my own authorship. Why? Well because I’m selfish and narcissistic, that’s why. The first two books, I decided, would be Blood on the Golden Horn and The Heist, both written by myself. The next would be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the infinitely hilarious Douglas Adams. H2G2, as it’s been abbreviated, is one of my favorite books of all time, and greatly represents modern speech and diction. Next up came The Fellowship of the Ring, the first novel in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings series. I thought this book was an appropriate choice, considering it created the fantasy genre. Follow that was Ulysses by James Joyce. Considered by many the best book ever written in the English language, it was all too perfect for a study like this. To try and spice things up a bit and get a better range of data, I decided that the last books would all be something other than just pure fiction. For my scientific book, I chose On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin, a landmark book. Paradise Lost, the epic poem by John Milton, came next. And what better to top off a study on the English language than a play by the man who essentially made the language what it is today? My last text was Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
With my books chosen, I plugged them into my Java program and recorded the results of each. Then, I graphed each and every book. You can view all eight graphs here. (The image is too big to post here). With all the books totals counted, I added them all together to get a grand total across all eight works. With this grand total, I then found out the percentage each letter took of the total letters (which happened to be 3,910,041). With that, I created the final graph.
As you can see, this graph looks eerily similar to the first graph. It seems that at even such a small amount of letters as 347, the distribution holds true from that all the way up to almost 4 million different letters. To my surprise, the letters used most are not the five vowels. The top five letters used are “e,” “t,” “a,” “o,” and “i.” “U” is missing from the top, replaced by “t.” But even if “t” was eliminated, “u” would still be nowhere near the top. What a curious little language we have. I hope that this little experiment of sorts has given you a bit more knowledge about the language that we all use each and every day!
NOTE: If you want to see the full data table of the number of letters in each book, all the charts, and the like, you can download my report here (in .xls).
