Germany sends Maradona and Argentina packing with a stunning 4-0 victory at Green Point Stadium. And a well-deserved victory it was — the Germans came out as a disciplined eleven playing as a team, while Argentina generally lacked discipline. If anything, the Germans were a little loose on offense, while the Argentines were loose on defense, and you just can’t have poor goal-zone defense in a World Cup quarter-finals match. With three four-goal games so far the Germans are emerging as definite favorites for the Cup. Herzlichen Glückwunsch!
It’s kind of depressing to think that these people have a large number of nuclear weapons.
According to CNN, Americans didn’t understand a speech delivered yesterday by President Obama because he was using language that was too advanced for them to comprehend. The speech is generally accepted as having been written to a 10th grade level. On the other hand it’s now a hell of a lot easier for us foreigners to understand how George W. Bush managed to win two Presidential elections.
Nothing is ever as it seems with North Korea
The DPRK made it to the world cup and beating expectations, but their fans are a little odd — but then they would be, as they’re not actually North Koreans, but rather Chinese volunteers paid by Pyongyang to attend the games and cheer loudly.
Making football enjoyable again
Like the World Cup but can’t stand the vuvuzela, that plastic horn that just fills the air with an indistinct drone for literally every second of the game? Lifehacker has you covered by showing you ways to get rid of that dread scourge while still enjoying some good football.
Is Reddit on the path to decline?
For a long time I’ve been a member of reddit.com, which is a fairly popular blog of sorts, but recently I’ve started to wonder if it hasn’t jumped the shark and entered its natural period of decline.
I’m not usually a big fan of the whole “is this what this site has become” whines, and this isn’t going to be a note about how the content used to be so much better than it is now (although one may say that such naysayers have a point, what with imgur.com now practically being the most prominent source of links). The site has grown tremendously and recruited users from outside its traditional scientist/engineer base to become more of a general content site, although it does have its overall tendencies, viz. atheism and political liberalism.
That being said, over the past few months it seems that the site is succumbing to its own success. Site performance is generally marginal, and during busy times you’re disturbingly likely to get a 502 error page instead of the comments page you wanted. The search functionality, which was never one of the site’s strengths, is now basically unusable; when doing a search you’re most likely to get the message that reddit is “under heavy load”. Likewise when you attempt to check your unread messages, you often end up with the picture of the reddit alien sweating while carrying a big object on his back (get it? “under heavy load”? harharhar). And of course there has recently been a bit of outright downtime.
The problem is that this just isn’t supposed to happen, not for a site which prides itself on its tech-heavy roots, and especially not for a site which has been acquired by a large corporation. Availability issues are understandable for sites such as this one, which do not have a server farm available to accommodate an excess of requests; but in reddit’s case it’s owned by Condé-Nast, a company with a lot of resources at its disposal. The site has had a few upgrade-related outages in the not-too-distant past. It would appear that the upgrades did not really resolve the underlying issues. It would seem that reddit doesn’t scale as well as its owners think it does.
At the same time it’s not like demand for sites such as reddit is showing signs of abating. The site’s pageviews have grown 1200% since January 2009 (acc. to Alexa) and over 10% in the past three months. So reddit’s capacity problems, it seems, are only going to get worse with time, especially given that they can’t really cope now. Which is really odd for a site whose membership could once be relied on to say that they knew 20 programming languages and “only” used 5 or 6 on a regular basis…
Needs to work on its composition skills…
If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if a sea turtle managed to get hold of a camera in a waterproof case and shoot its own videos, wonder no longer. The camera was dropped in the water near Aruba and has resurfaced 7 months later in Key West.
Death by kitty
I never thought about it much besides it being a plot element in Trainspotting, but apparently toxoplasmosis could be a bigger influence in human behavior than people think.
Oh sure, just don’t let that stop the shrill hysteria!
In the UK a drug nicknamed “meow” was outlawed following what appeared to be the death of two users (imagine if alcohol had been outlawed after a mere two drinkers had died of it!). The ban came swiftly amid much public outrage; however it turns out that neither of the “victims” had taken the drug at all.
Part thriller and part environmental snuff flick
If you want to see what millions of gallons of crude look like as they pour into the ocean, as well as what people with robots are trying to do about it, check out the live ROV monitoring of the damaged riser that is causing the leak of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Hosted by BP and featuring robots.
Well, that’s just his answer to everything.
South Korea has officially blamed North Korea for the sinking of the warship Cheonan, and now North Korea is mobilizing for war. So what would John Bolton do about it? WWJBD?
- Demand an aggressive restart to the six-party regional talks
- Bomb North Korea
- Bomb Iran
- Option 3 again.
This is of course a trick question as both 3 and 4 are correct. John Bolton would deal with North Korea by bombing Iran… or did he just dredge up an old Word doc and lazily change all mentions of “Iran” to “North Korea” except for that last one? It’s one thing to bomb another country out of malice or incompetence, and another to do so because you’re too lazy to double-check your own documents. Sometimes it seems to me that the only thing standing between John Bolton and an ICC tribunal for crimes against humanity is access to power. Good thing no one’s dumb enough to give this batshit-insane psycho any.