wednesday linkspam

[sciatrix]

muccamukk hosted a discussion about opt-in versus opt-out linking, and the ethics of linking in light of the knock-on effects of your readers and what they choose to do.

lannamichaels found out that a Vienna Teng song is about politics, which makes total sense in the context of the lyrics but is not something I would have guessed. I love "Stray Italian Greyhound" to pieces, and knowing this thing just makes me love it more.

For as little as $29, this company promises to "brainwash" an individual person on Facebook. Whether or not the startup in question can effectively pull this off--and neither the author nor I am convinced--this is a really creepy fucking thing to see, and a good nudge to me to turn my adblockers back on. (Fuck, it's hard--I want to give certain places the benefit of the doubt and revenue, but at the same time, I don't like to be manipulated. The internet is very, very bad at working out what I might like, so I hope it's working.)

This piece on what it's like to be an internet advice columnist is pretty hilarious.

So is this list of "unparliamentary language" that NZ politicians have gotten penalized for using. And there's a Canadian edition here, too.

Still giggling at weird Puritan names, okay. Has-Descendants! Tace! Wrestling!

This Maia Szalavitz piece on media coverage of opiods is excellent. I really like her writing generally.

Remember when feral emus roamed Texas?

This reflection on the creation of the bisexual pride flag gave me a lot of feelings.

Man injects 18 doses of semen into arm to cure back pain. Spoiler: did not work.

Via kabarett: To unlock the brain's mysteries, puree it. Still working out what I think of this one. I work on enough brains to think that cell counting is probably not the best way to go about what we're doing, but most of her conclusions support and inform certain other aspects of comparative neuroanatomy (e.g. the importance of cortical volume, at least for mammals). I notice that the article doesn't mention a thing I would think is completely essential to understanding the findings it mentions in birds, which is that birds don't have a cortex as we understand it--that's a mammals thing. Birds do have an older analogous structure, but their brains are organized a little differently, and they do not rely on cortical surface area to get things done as mammals do. It's really interesting in that vein that bird brains are so much denser in terms of neurons.

I have to wonder how important the specifically cortical structures are outside of a mammalian context, that's all. (I brought it to Metafilter, where a few other neuroscientists weighed in.)

Comments

[elf]

Use adblockers without guilt.

I will consider turning them off when the websites that host ads take some responsibility for hostile ads on their platform - when they pay medical bills for seizures caused by blinky ads, or pay to repair computers infested with malware from ads, or give refunds to the people who were caught by fraudulent ads. Currently, AFAIK, not a single web host that uses external ads is willing to accept liability for the damage those ads cause, so I feel no guilt whatsoever in blocking them all.

There's the secondary issue that the entire ad-funding thing is based on puffery and lies: ad makers are willing to pay for views/hits on the theory that eyeballs = money someday. Supporting this revenue stream only makes websites convinced that they need more advert money and not other funding options. It also convinces advertisers that they're doing something right ("Thousands of people are looking at our products! Some of them must be customers!") and they just need to find the right tweak to turn views into cash.

[sciatrix]

Yeah, that's a good point about incentives--most of the places I would like to send a bit of money with my eyeviews, I'm already tithing a little with actual cash anyway in some form. (This currently includes both MeFi and DW, which is making me happy: it's nice to be in a place where my finances permit such a thing.) It might not be much, but the ad revenue isn't what it used to be, either, especially since I never click ads myself or even really look at them. (T does, which confuses me: the targeting has historically been so bad for me that I tend to blank the ad space out as empty space on the screen anyway, so the idea of paying attention is weird.)

[kaberett]

(I resent the hell out of ads because so many of them are actively triggering so, yeah, I'll happily keep blocking for that reason in addition to all of the others stated above! I am somewhat bitterly resigned, at this point, to the fact that Duolingo is (i) really cross about me using an adblocker and (ii) categorically unwilling to reply to my support requests saying "I'm not willing to pay the full amount you're charging for premium membership because it's not in my budget and I don't need all of the features, but I'm willing to pay you a smaller flat fee of e.g. £X per annum in order to support you without seeing ads"...)

[sciatrix]

I know right? Like, for games that are clearly aiming for the freemium model, good luck ever prying anything out of me... but I'll generally pony up the two or three bucks to get rid of the ads, once I'm sure I like it enough. I wish Duolingo could do similar.