Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets about what the Olympics would be like on Mars, doing the best coverage of the games so far.
Dear Olympics - Please replace every last one of your uninteresting, incompetent commentators with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
This would be infinitely more watchable.
Did you see those silly cats on Tumblr, that breaking news on Twitter, and those photos of your friend’s kids on Facebook? Different social networks have their own distinct personalities. Bitly links are shared across all social networking services, giving us a unique viewpoint on how these…
This is fascinating, but I think it gives very little attention to the most important part of this, which is: When are the people that you’re trying to reach most active on that service? The fact that Tumblr gets a lot of sharing use in the evening hours isn’t surprising, because it has a high concentration of younger users. But those might not be the people you are trying to reach; Tumblr also has a good audience reading it at work, and if you’re targeting those people you’re probably better off posting earlier in the day.
“Friday evening, a no-man’s land on other platforms, is an optimal time to post on Tumblr.” This actually corresponds with what we’ve noticed. A lot of mornings might be a little slow for us, but post something at 10 p.m. on a Sunday and it blows up. Fascinating trend.
It costs £30,000 a day to operate our neutron beams, but for three days we had no helium to run our experiments on those beams. In other words we wasted £90,000 because we couldn’t get any helium. Yet we put the stuff into party balloons and let them float off into the upper atmosphere, or we use it to make our voices go squeaky for a laugh. It is very, very stupid. It makes me really angry.Neutron beam research team leader Oleg Kirichek • Expressing rage at the shortage of the helium supply, which prevented his very important team from doing very important work. The earth has a limited supply of helium, which is a byproduct of petrochemical work — but for decades the gas was cheap, leading to shortages, or as Kirichek puts it: ”Now the stockpile is used up, prices are rising and we are realising how stupid we have been.” Get this guy some laughing gas; he needs to calm down a little.
Ever wonder why giant squids have eyes the size of basketballs? The better to see their predators with.
A poster inspired by yesterday’s amazing marshmallow cannon situation. Obama’s mouth has never been so agape.
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