I suppose if I don’t want someone to feel paranoid then I shouldn’t act suspicious.

#michaelmyers

Captchas are those scrambled words and box that some websites force you to deal with in order to complete their forms. Developers use them because they help stop the spambots from filling up their databases and email queues with junk data.

Why are they stupid? Because they shift the spambot problem away from the developers and onto the visitors.

The thing is — it’s not the visitor’s problem. It’s not my problem. It’s your problem and you, as a developer, should deal with it. I don’t care if you’re using my captcha response to digitize books or provide water for kids in Africa. Visitors shouldn’t be at the mercy of high-and-mighty developers who’d rather tinker with their controllers and models and database schemas. I’ve been witness and victim to too many lazy backend developers who unloaded their problems onto other people.

Developers: figure it out.

I know what you’re thinking — Facebook, Google, Twitter — the big boys all use them. Try this thinking instead: your users. Anything that stands in the way of an awesome experience that lands on my desk gets an automatic veto. It doesn’t matter if it adds another day or another week to the project. I don’t care about your development hurdles, I care about generating revenue and 100% of the time that depends on user experience.

The visitor interaction of whatever software you’re developing is what counts. Visitors fill out your forms because they want to interact with you, and more likely your boss. Capturing their data, making that process as simple as possible, that’s more important than not capturing the spambot’s.

#devhell #webdev

I wouldn’t mind being at work if I could come home to this…

#pumpkins

Quite possibly the best candy EVA.

#photos #foodies

I’ve always thought Harrison Ford and Steve Martin had similar voices. So naturally, I decided the world needed a Blade Runner / Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid mashup.

#bladerunner #funnies #videos

FedEx Indicted for Role in Distributing Prescription Drugs

Prosecutors say that Congress, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies warned FedEx for nearly a decade that their shipping services were being used to illegally distribute drugs like oxycodone and hydrocodone. However, prosecutors say, the largest cargo company in the world ignored the notices.

A decade of warnings before taking action? Sounds like me.

#meanwhile

I hit every green light coming to work this morning. What the what is going on?

#trafficnews

I just ate like two pounds of chocolate covered peanuts. I mean like what was I supposed to do?

#foodies

So this was “a thing” tonight.

#photos #homeimprovement

The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why

When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalizes most humans is, “Is there other intelligent life out there?” Let’s put some numbers to it (if you don’t like numbers, just read the bold)—

As many stars as there are in our galaxy (100 – 400 billion), there are roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe—so for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there’s a whole galaxy out there. All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of between 10²² and 10²⁴ total stars, which means that for every grain of sand on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there.

The science world isn’t in total agreement about what percentage of those stars are “sun-like” (similar in size, temperature, and luminosity)—opinions typically range from 5% to 20%. Going with the most conservative side of that (5%), and the lower end for the number of total stars (1022), gives us 500 quintillion, or 500 billion billion sun-like stars.

There’s also a debate over what percentage of those sun-like stars might be orbited by an Earth-like planet (one with similar temperature conditions that could have liquid water and potentially support life similar to that on Earth). Some say it’s as high as 50%, but let’s go with the more conservative 22% that came out of a recent PNAS study. That suggests that there’s a potentially-habitable Earth-like planet orbiting at least 1% of the total stars in the universe—a total of 100 billion billion Earth-like planets.

So there are 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world. Think about that next time you’re on the beach.

Moving forward, we have no choice but to get completely speculative. Let’s imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life (if that’s true, every grain of sand would represent one planet with life on it). And imagine that on 1% of those planets, the life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. That would mean there were 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe.

Moving back to just our galaxy, and doing the same math on the lowest estimate for stars in the Milky Way (100 billion), we’d estimate that there are 1 billion Earth-like planets and 100,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.^[1]

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an organization dedicated to listening for signals from other intelligent life. If we’re right that there are 100,000 or more intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, and even a fraction of them are sending out radio waves or laser beams or other modes of attempting to contact others, shouldn’t SETI’s satellite array pick up all kinds of signals?

But it hasn’t. Not one. Ever.

#cosmos