magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
Yesterday's xkcd had an interesting challenge in its mouseover-text.


Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".


So far, I've tried it with Spark Plugs, Banana Slugs, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Chuck Palahniuk, Infantry, Carnarvon (Western Australia), and Fatal Hilarity. It all works. Usually inside of twenty-thirty clicks. After doing this long enough, you begin to see certain patterns and get a feel for when you're getting close to the Philosophy goal. For example, once you hit Natural Science or Social Science, you know there's no escape.

I think it has everything to do with the format of defining everything in more-general terms. So you can start with something that seems entirely unrelated to anything philosophical like Vilii, a "type of yoghurt (a mesophilic fermented milk) that originated in the Nordic countries," with a "ropey, gelatinous consistency and a sour taste resulting from lactic acid," but Viili is a kind of yoghurt, which sends you on through dairy product » food » plant » living (and here you start thinking, uh-oh, we're on the track for philosophy) » objects » physics (and here, the physics link is marked as already visited; you end up at physics in a lot of the paths) » natural science (remember how I said there was no escape?) » science » knowledge » facts » information, sequence, mathematics (admittedly, once you get onto the "information" leg, it does circle around a little), quantity, property, modern philosophy (uh-oh), and finally, philosophy.

There's already a significant amount of talk on the phenomenon on the Philosophy "Talk" page. People have found articles that put you into an infinite loop (as of this writing "understatement" was the first qualifying link in the Ernest Hemmingway article, and the first qualifying link in the understatement article was "Ernest Hemmingway"), but it seems to hold true for the majority of articles people have tested.

So, there's your random minor mindblow for the day.
magistrate: The arc of the Earth in dark space. (Default)
LiveJournal, for reasons known only to them, has begun stripping out any inline styles written into a tag using the style="" attribute.

This one really has me frothing at the mouth, partly because the RP I'm in (and have been for the better part of three years has always been a place to explore a lot of different modes of storytelling, and those modes extend to things like hiding easter eggs (links and whitetext) in the tags, playing with formatting to represent the mental state of characters, coding certain types of psychic activity to certain colors... even things as simple as letting a character scribble out what they've written. Basically, we've enjoyed playing with hypertext as a medium. The internet makes something that's only beginning to show its head in traditional literature (see, for example: House of Leaves) accessible, and it's been a great deal of fun channelling our assembled creativity into this.

Now, that's rendered impossible. Worse, the work we've already done has also been stripped of its styling. In some cases, the tags have degraded gracefully. In others, they've been rendered almost unreadable.

I've set up a side-by-side comparison of the styled and unstyled tags here: http://adravet.net/misc/btr_misc/stripped_css.html, and I've started a support ticket here: http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1173954& as well as brought it up on a news post here: http://news.livejournal.com/130727.html?thread=91337895 .

I hope that this is a bug; or, if it was a deliberate choice on the part of the developers, that they can be persuaded to reverse it. For a service which advertises itself as a place to express yourself, this is a very disheartening occurrence.

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