Why We Hear Voices in Random Noise - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/why-we-hear-voices-in-random-noise <comment><USER2> A few years ago, I was struggling to find the weak, electronic signal of an ion in a single-particle ion trap. I was certain the ion was still in the trap, but I probably had the trapping voltage wrong and the ion was not in resonance with the narrow-band (300 Hz) detector. I was trying to think where to borrow a broad-band FFT detector this late at night to look for the ion, when I realized I could just mix down the signal to the auditory range and use headphones to let my ears do the "FFT". I would easily get a few kHz of bandwidth this way!

But after only a few minutes of listening to the white noise of the (likely empty) trap, I started to hear voices, among which was the voice of the deceased PostDoc who had designed the experiment. I took the headphones off and never used that method again.

I'm afraid it would be quite easy to drive oneself mad this way.

<comment><USER3> You might like the book Snow Crash. Spoilers: One of the plot points is that looking at certain visual pattern (in the form of tv static/snow) can permanently destroy someone's mind. The later parts of the book explore auditory signals.

This premise is somewhat believable since there are already people affected by epilepsy and can't tolerate flashing lights. And even regular folks are susceptible to optical illusions with (short-term)lasting effects such as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect), [https://gfycat.com/CoordinatedSleepyAnole](https://gfycat.com/CoordinatedSleepyAnole), etc.

I wonder if they are really some combination of sensory input that can like you say "drive oneself mad" after exposure.

Side note: Optical illusions also affect artificial neural networks where they misclassify noise with high confidence as real objects: [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/03/30/breaking- convnets/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/03/30/breaking-convnets/)

<comment><USER4> I love Snow Crash. And whenever someone recommends it for that bit I want to also recommend the short story "Blit" by David Langford, from 1988: [http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm)

<comment><USER5> That. Is. Bloody. Frightening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also, there's a strong element (methinks) of us hearing what we expect or want to hear. Extra easy to listen for a pattern if you know it in advance.

(Compulsory anecdote - when studying, I was member of a ham radio club which dabbled with just about anything tangentially related to electronics. And, being students, we did so while consuming lots of beer)

Anyway - we did get a thrill from scoring firsts - say, being the first Norwegian hams to successfully log contact with another country on a given frequency band / mode.

One evening one of our members was positive he heard an Australian beacon transmitting in the 160M (just above broadcast AM) band - a band suffering from epic amounts of atmospheric and man-made noise.

Still, he was adamant he could repeatedly copy the beacon's morse code callsign - buried in the noise, sure - BUT IT WAS THERE!!!

Luckily, a couple of other members looked into it before he filed the claim; that particular beacon had been offline for the better part of a year at the time he heard it...)

</comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi I had never seen this described before, but I have always experimented it with noise such as from air conditioners or plane flights. Especially plane flights, as the noise is so loud. However, I don't hear voices, but music (maybe because I'm a music lover?) And I have learned to control it, so that I can somewhat listen to the music I want (kind of: I can control the melody, but timbre control is very limited, and sometimes I lose melody control too). It keeps me entertained for a while on flights.

A pity the article doesn't really explain the reason. I have always assumed (just as a wild, uninformed guess) that it's because the noise contains a wide selection of frequencies, so if our brain is looking for one for some reason, it can tune the others away and isolate it.

<comment><USER7> I think I know what you mean. It's quite easy for me as well to take a white noise type of sound and "hear" a certain note that I might decide to imagine. Then change it a little and "hear" that new note in the same sound.

Like you, I've always assumed it's just because the noise really contains a whole lot of different frequencies. Interesting to talk about it because I've never really thought much about it before.

It's a conscious thing for me. I don't really hear the notes in the noise unless I think them on purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suffer from tinnitus predicated on hearing loss and I routinely experience auditory pareidolia as part of what amounts to prior stimulus replay.

For example where I live there is a test of the civil emergency sirens every Saturday at noon and every Saturday afternoon I perceive faint echos of the test well in to the evening.

A more disturbing example is from watching sporting events on TV. I'm a big fan of rugby so I watch a lot of matches. Late in the evening long after the TV has been turned off I perceive faint crowd noise and speech which seems very much to be the announcers (i.e. in their accent) coming from the room where the TV is located. It's enough to drive me out of my comfort to go check on things to make extra-double sure that everything has been turned off (even though I know full well it's off).

It's hard to put into words how distressing these experiences can be. The "fact" that "only crazy people hear voices" being a significant contributor. It's also interesting that just knowing that enough people have had similar experiences that there is a phrase "auditory pareidolia" has turned out to be so comforting.

<comment><USER9> Sounds similar to 'Musical ear syndrome': [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_ear_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_ear_syndrome)

Unfortunately most of the proposed causes seem pretty speculative to me. Good old "brain searching for a pattern" seems like the obvious one to reach for. Fortunately it seems to be relatively common (although it is disconcerting). I've been experiencing this recently and I swear I can hear AM band radio.

Interestingly, the 'white noise' backdrop for these 'phantom sounds' is generated by one of 2 machines in my house: an air purifier and an aircon unit. Even more interesting is that both have air-ionisers built in to them for air purification purposes (negative ions from the purifier, unclear what's in the A/C).

At the risk of sounding a little crazy, I wonder if there's possibly a connection...

EDIT: If there was something to this, it would certainly give more meaning to the phrase 'babbling brook' (i.e. breaking water negatively ionises the surrounding area). I know that sounds up there with other hippy-science like 'crystal healing', but take a look at [1] & [2].

[1] [http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/negative-ions- create-p...](http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/negative-ions-create- positive-vibes#1) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_air_ionization_therap...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_air_ionization_therapy#Mechanism)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A few years ago I was in my room late at night. Everyone else was asleep in the house. The AC unit in that part of the house was really loud. At one point, the noise began to sound like ambient chords resonating in a cathedral. It continued for almost 30 minutes. To this day, I can't explain it. My only guess is that my mind was taking the white noise of the AC and mixing it up somehow, allowing me to hear music. I wish I had a more scientific explanation.

</comment><comment><USER11> "the perception of patterns in randomness where none exist"

"Notably it was an election year, and associations between Islam and terrorism were widespread, suggesting that such interpretations were not entirely random"

"The "reality" our minds impose on random noise, influenced by our idiosyncratic beliefs and predispositions, can also be harmful"

" all experiences of auditory pareidolia are a form of hallucination"

Ive had a hypothesis for a while that prejudice/isms work the same way. The brain is just trying to make sense of vast amounts of noise. So many sounds, coming from so many directions, so many colors forming so many different shapes, which could be other living things, which could have various agendas(helpful or otherwise), so many memories...

Our egos can't handle the idea that we dont know, so we assume. Its a defense mechanism I think. After all, history repeats itself, so the most likely outcome is the one we have seen. Of course, we havent seen very much at all, and we might have misinterpreted what we did see.

And this leads to thinking we know all about people. We know all about people we've never met, we know what people are thinking when they do something... All because we are trying to make sense of the world using a microscopic amount of information.

Basically I think prejudice, projection, psychological biases, etc are all 'hallucinations' when we try to make sense of a world we cannot possibly completely understand.

edit can -> can't

</comment><comment><USER12> Some people have tried to use this to communicate with the dead: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21922834](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21922834)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomenon)

</comment><comment><USER13> Because meaning is our survival advantage.

<comment><USER14> How does hallucinating provide survival advantage?

<comment><USER15> "Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us."

― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

<comment><USER16> I think this also explains the survival advantage of apparently hearing your phone ring while you're in the shower. Those who heed the faint beckoning get the benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How common is this? I see faces in the clouds as much as (I've always assumed) the next man, but I don't believe I've ever experienced hearing voices in the noise. What's the best sort of 'random noise' to try and experience this?

<comment><USER18> I don't experience it either, although I do sometimes see patterns in the snow on an untuned CRT TV. Anyway, if you want to experiment there's a white noise generator at [https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php](https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php), along with lots of other generators on the same site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unless I didn't read carefully enough, it's not really an answer to why we hear things. It simply confirms that some people do hear things and reminds us what such phenomena is called. Interesting nonetheless.

<comment><USER20> Actually it does in that it explains the brain is wired as well as trained to detect certain patterns, and even in the absence of a true signal it will try and detect the signals it expects and produce spurious results.

<comment><USER21> I tried to explain just this to a friend who is a chronic conspiracy theorist. My suggestion to him was that his brain was detecting signal even where there was none, and seeing patterns in random events - which everyone is prone to do from time to time - though in his case the sensitivity is dialled way, way up.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, this is the impetus for things like sympathetic magic and other misapplications of correlation (or causation).

<comment><USER20> I'm inclined, via intuition rather than data, to think that things like paranoia, conspiracy thinking, etc are akin to auto-immune responses like asthma where the absence of real threats causes the system to become hyper- sensitive and attack itself or things that aren't truly threatening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've heard it's the voices of the dead. I'm going with that.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hearing voices in sound (1 temporal + 1 pressure) reminds me of a random article I read a few days ago about finding patterns in images (2 spatial). I mention the dimensionality to just reflect that these are perhaps two instances of the same phenomenon:

[http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/995095](http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/995095)

Also, here's a more casual/fun post I happened to read earlier today, coincidentally:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3280816/What- photo...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3280816/What-photos-s- faces-suffer-facial-pareidolia.html)

> "I thought I was going crazy. When my air conditioner is on, I wake up and > hear light conversations. I would go to the window to see if anyone was > outside, or I would turn the air conditioner off [and] it would stop. > Sometimes it sounds like a radio."

I have been sleeping with a fan on for six years, to provide background noise so that any outdoor audial perturbations would not disturb me as much. When I have housemates, or I am visiting family, I will often be disturbed so much sometimes, that I will get up and silent my fan because I am very sure that a conversation or break-in is happening downstairs. Every time, I realize it was my imagination, followed by wondering if I am developing schizophrenia or if I am just a hypochondriac, and then I go back to sleep.

> "I would hear faint voices—whispering, conversing, singing, or chanting! It > sounded like a crowded room, full of people at a party in a distant room > somewhere in the building. After a while I came to enjoy the sound, as they > seemed to be enjoying themselves at the 'party,' and it helped lull me to > sleep at night."

> If you hear a symphony in Manhattan traffic, thank your auditory pareidolia > for relieving your stress

Sounds like the better part of a great LSD trip. Good to know I am not alone in experiencing pareidolia, I thought I was going crazy, too. I can't help but think the background fan is not perfectly consistent background noise. Jitter in the wires due to external forces would lead to variable rotation speed in the motor, which would lead to ups/downs in amplitude and pitch. Our ears are sensitive enough to capture these distortions, and our brains are powerful enough to amplify or attenuate our perception of these distortions. Even if our ears can't capture these perturbations, I would think that the mere innocent thought or knowledge (or, more ominously, paranoia or suspicion) of these distortions is enough to create such a perception by the brain.

Initial Reaction: If you form a vector of time-convolution of the output of the fan with respect to all of your internalized sounds (fragments, phonemes, words, etc.), over all of their possible phases (accents, volume, pitch, etc.), you could see which sounds the fan is most likely to resemble based on how big the corresponding matrix element is compared to the others. Even if the overlap is .01% with a certain sound, if the next leading overlap is 1,000 times smaller, I bet our brains would pick up on that relative difference. I know it does with visual field (e.g. optical illusions), and there is reason to believe that the brain has a grand unified learning algorithm for all data[0][1] (data is normalized as electromagnetic input anyways)

After reading this, that view is challenged:

[http://www.haskins.yale.edu/featured/sws/swssentences/senten...](http://www.haskins.yale.edu/featured/sws/swssentences/sentences.html#)

Researchers at Haskins lab have gotten rid of the Fourier components in regular speech, in which case the inner products mentioned above would be zero, and the synthetic sound _should_ be orthogonal to your internalized sounds. Nevertheless, I listened to some of this SWS, and could understand it with 90% accuracy. So, this is very strange. But does it make sense? If you apply a high frequency shift (e.g. gerbils effect) to some function, you can still understand the speech, even though it's effectively orthogonal to the original function. Reading more into the OP paper:

> "spill-over from parts of my auditory system that recognize the air > conditioner, or the shower or the sound of the kettle, into areas of my > nervous system that are responsible for processing speech and language." He > went on, "And that spillover doesn't require similarity. It just requires > some kind of shared activity."

I am starting to like this theory, and reminds me of an earlier conversation on HN about corpus callosotomy not getting rid of spillover from other parts of the brain [2]. But that "spillover" resulted in useful information transfer, whereas the quote here would suggest it is much more random. Also, it would suggest that the frequency might not be as important as dA_i(t)/dt, for all i, where A_i(t) is the amplitude for the ith frequency, like in Haskins lab.

> But much of our perception of the world also results from the interaction > between what we might expect to happen in a given situation, given our > beliefs, and the processing of incoming sensory information

This explains why I imagined the sounds as my family or friends talking or someone breaking-in.

> minds impose on random noise, influenced by our idiosyncratic beliefs and > predispositions, can also be harmful

Yes, it is important to take action to ensure you are not going crazy. E.g. get up, turn off the fan, and listen: did the conversation/robbery stop? If it did, try it again tomorrow. After several times, one should realize that it is unlikely that the robberies and conversation are happening, and that it is more likely due to brain perception mechanics.

[0] [http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-study-shows-brain- s-a...](http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-study-shows-brain-s- adaptability-112639)

[1] [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=rewire+optical+nerve+mice+rats+audial+vision)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13503186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13503186)</comment>


Understanding bufferbloat and the network buffer arms race - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/understanding-bufferbloat-and-the-network-buffer-arms-race.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> This issue was discussed briefly here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2002992> This Ars Technica article has a much better explanation and is an easier read.</comment>


Did Google Hire Ray Kurzweil to Produce Skynet?  - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/was-ray-kurzweil-hired-by-google-to-produce-skynet

<comment><USER2> No?</comment>


How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170123-how-insects-like-bumblebees-do-so-much-with-tiny-brains <comment><AUTHOR> Highly relevant is the Portia genus of spiders ([0], [1]) and apparently other related jumping spiders ([2]).

One of my favorite excerpts from [1]:

> Harland says Portia's eyesight is the place to start. Jumping spiders > already have excellent vision and Portia's is ten times as good, making it > sharper than most mammals. However being so small, there is a trade-off in > that Portia can only focus its eyes on a tiny spot. It has to build up a > picture of the world by scanning almost pixel by pixel across the visual > scene. Whatever Portia ends up seeing, the information is accumulated > slowly, as if peering through a keyhole, over many minutes. So there might > be something a little like visual experience, but nothing like a full and > "all at once" experience of a visual field.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_\(spider\)) [1] - [http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.ht...](http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.html) [2] - [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160121-jumping- sp...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160121-jumping-spiders- animals-science/)

<comment><USER2> Portia spiders are also referenced in Peter Watts' Echopraxia. (Some spoilers could be inferred from thinking about this too hard while reading the novel.)

<comment><USER3> _Some spoilers could be inferred from thinking about this too hard while reading the novel_

Not.. if you don't say that...

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I guess it's a bit like saying "don't think about a pink elephant", but _not_ saying that doesn't guarantee that they won't think of a pink elephant.

And I'd wager that people who would read about the Portia, and would read Blindsight and Echopraxia are the type to think long and hard about such topics anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a video of the bumblebee string pulling behaviour to get at the "nectar": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSCr5OxXN1A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSCr5OxXN1A).

Quite extraordinary.

<comment><USER5> It's interesting that bees can learn new tasks, but this is amazing:

> Other bumblebees learned by observing trained demonstrators from a distance. > Only a small minority solved the task spontaneously. The experiments suggest > that learning a nonnatural task in bumblebees can spread culturally through > populations.

<comment><USER4> I know: mind blown. Amazing communication (and observation) skills. I've certainly developed a newfound respect for the humble bee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Eusocial insects like honeybees, some wasps, and ants take this even one step further by combining the extraordinary but limited powers of one individual insect to make highly-complex decisions with the coordinated input from thousands or millions of individuals. It's often stated that after humans, these eusocial insects are the most advanced life form on earth. After studying, for example, the fascinating voting process of how honeybees choose a new home during swarming, I am in full agreement.

<comment><USER7> Bees, ants, and (I think) other hive living insects share ~75% of their DNA with their hive mates.

This makes it reasonable to think of the _hive_ as one individual!

Just like we are made of individual cells and organs, an ant hill is made up of individual ants. That the parts can move separately is a fairly superficial difference.

<comment><USER8> I think you mean 100% because ants are clones. The only difference between them and the queen is the nurturing process they go through which influences epigenetics.

<comment><USER9> Welcome to the complexities of Hymenoptera genetics! Workers are 75% related to each other (sisters) and only 50% related to their mother (the queen). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_rati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy#Relatedness_ratios_in_haplodiploidy)

<comment><USER10> I remember reading essay on bees and altruism. Standard line is bees are altruistic because workers are 75% related. Author made the claim that's bunkum because a) Honey bees are rather extreme. b) Multiple male fathers.

Bee reproductive setups are really diverse with honey bees at one end, solitary bees at the other, and just about anything else between.

<comment><USER6> The eusocial altruistic behavior of bees and other Hymenoptera requires relatedness (kin selection), but it also requires other ecological benefits like a nest that could be kept safe across multiple generations. This work is detailed exhaustively by Richard Alexander where he discusses origins of altruistic group behavior in both eusocial species and humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Read _Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems_ [1] if you want more information on how very complex behavior can emerge from jumping spiders and bees. After reading that book, it seemed to me that AI researchers should focus much more time on duplicating the feats of these simpler animals (in similarly computationally limited contexts) rather than focusing on duplicating extremely high level human faculties like reasoning and even playing Go. I mean, imagine a robot with the intelligence of a parrot or the smartest birds in the corvidae family[2]. I think people would probably be afraid of autonomous robots of this level of intelligence.

[1] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complex-worlds-simpler- nervou...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complex-worlds-simpler-nervous- systems)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_crow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_crow)

<comment><USER12> I bet the drone industry will do work in that direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "With just a few hundred or thousand neurons, you can easily recognise perhaps a hundred faces".

It makes me think we are missing something when creating arificial neural networks which needs much more neurons to achieve only this specific task. Maybe artificial neurons are too simplified models compared to biological ones, maybe our training process could be much more efficient?

<comment><USER14> If I had to guess: neural networks have to operate on pixel data whereas real neurons don't. Brains and eyes have evolved in tandem. Perhaps what makes them so efficient is that the eyes handle some of the processing as a consequence of their physical shape and characteristics.

Look at the eyes of bees. Very different from our own (and from the cameras we build) and perhaps very specialized to the limited set of tasks that bees carry out?

<comment><USER15> The neurons in the eyes pre-process a huge amount of information converting data from about 126M rods and cones to 1M ganglion cells - a pretty amazing amount of data compression.

Ref: [https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Kaufmann- Interactive-...](https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Kaufmann-Interactive- Technologies/dp/0123708966)

<comment><USER16> I guess that's true for mammalian eyes, but what about insect eyes? If the bumble brain only hold 200k neurons, how many do their eyes have on board?

<comment><USER17> ~7000 elements per compound eye according to this page:

[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/brookfieldfarmhoney.wordpress...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/brookfieldfarmhoney.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/the- eyes-have-it-honeybee-eyes/amp/)

<comment><USER16> That's individual lenses, right? But it says that each lens has its own photoreceptor(s). So that is a multiple of 7000.

<comment><USER16> So if that's three photo receptors per facet, already each eye is rivaling the neuron count of the brain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slightly off-topic but related. BEAM robots created by Mark Tilden who later founded WowWee might be of interest to readers.

From Wikipedia[0]: BEAM robotics (from Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics) is a style of robotics that primarily uses simple analogue circuits, such as comparators, instead of a microprocessor in order to produce an unusually simple design.

....

BEAM robots may use a set of the analog circuits, mimicking biological neurons, to facilitate the robot's response to its working environment.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics)

<comment><USER11> I would also suggest anyone that is interested in BEAM robotics to take a look at Braitenberg Vehicles[1]. These are simple reflex-based robots that can exhibit complex behaviors due to their interaction with their environment. Originally, they were thought experiments by the psychologist Valentino Braitenberg who showed in his book, Vehicles[2], how one might ascribe complex emotional and mental states to a simple automaton if one only observed its external behavior. For a fascinating earlier example of analog robotics, (and the first example of true autonomous robotics to my knowledge) one has the work of Grey Walter and his "tortoise" robots[3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle)

[2] [https://books.google.com/books?id=7KkUAT_q_sQC](https://books.google.com/books?id=7KkUAT_q_sQC) (there appears to be excerpts available for free as pdfs)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe the real question is 'why can we do so little with our giant brains?'

<comment><USER20> Maybe something along the lines of "our brains would overheat" \- there's a small temperature window in which proteins won't denature, it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle), and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power.

Maybe tin foil hats make good heatsinks..

Interestingly enough there is some evidence that the Gibbs free energy of ketone metabolism is more thermodynamically efficient than glucose in the brain (c.f. Dr. Richard Veech's work). You can measure a lower temperature gradient between the tongue temperature and the brain's.

*edit: s/Beech/Veech..

<comment><USER21> Doesn't that imply that people who live in hotter climates have...how can I put this politely?...a disadvantage when it comes to the stability of their brains? I would assume that the brain has a certain amount of redundancy, but has this ever been researched: How hot can it get before people start getting noticeably "stupider"?

<comment><USER2> Our bodies can cool themselves decently well by sweating. I think that if the climate was affecting you to the point where your brain was getting cooked, the symptom would probably be less "slightly dumber" and more "seizures and organ failure".

But I'm not a doctor or a scientist, so I could be completely wrong. Hopefully someone more informed will weigh in.

<comment><USER22> When diving to 90ft+ you get 'stupider' (nitrogen narcosis). Our instructor had us do simple math problems on a board underwater and timed us. We were doing them very very slowly but you don't feel that it is slower. It was an interesting experience meant to warn you that you won't realize that you are affected by nitrogen narcosis.

<comment><USER23> I've been there. It feels so good, you forget things and get unfocused

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article mentions lots of different insect skills such as spatial representation, route finding, pattern recognition, predation, etc, and then says that "Neurons act a little like wires, carrying electrical signals from one part of the brain to another. They are a biological version of the circuit board in a computer".

After reading the article, I was impressed by the insects, not by the BBC explainers.

<comment><USER25> Why? That analogy is so widely recognised and accepted that electronic engineers/neuroscientists are experimenting on computer circuit boards to assess the understanding of neuroscience.

"It does so by way of neuroscience's favourite analogy: comparing the brain to a computer. Like brains, computers process information by shuffling electricity around complicated circuits."

[http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2171497...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21714978-cautionary-tale-about-promises-modern-brain-science-tests- suggest)

<comment><USER26> Wires conduct signals unconditionally. Neurons may or may not transmit a signal depending on its complex network of inputs and internal state. A better technological analogy for neurons would be a signal processor.

Also, neurons interface using chemical messages in the form of many different neurotransmitters. The electrical phenomenon of cellular depolarization might as well be an implementation detail. If anything resembles a wire, it's the axon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was hoping there would be something in the article about emergent behavior in colonies of insects. If you think of the bees as a big group of automata, the complexity isn't so much in the individual bee's brain, but in the collective mind of the hive.

The research on nematodes, fruit flies and dragonflies - non-colony creatures - seems to contradict this, except none of their behaviors seemed as complex to me as the problem the bees were solving. But that might just be my programmer's brain over-simplifying the seek and flee behaviors I've put into NPCs.

</comment><comment><USER28> The article frames the behaviors it describes as "clever", but they're really not. The bees detect some pollen, get as near as they can, and their brain tells their bodies "try stuff!", and they exhibit some behaviors they typically use to get into small spaces or past objects. A "small minority" of the bees (quote from video of the test) get the pollen when they happen to try the right stuff. They excrete a chemical signaling to the other bees that they did something that worked, and the other bees can gradually copy the behavior.

None of this is "clever" \-- it's some amazing mechanisms they've selected into, but it's not figuring things out, using logic, or using tools. It's much more akin to a simple learning network playing super mario brothers and dying frequently until it eventually succeeds. It shouldn't surprise us that it only takes a few hundred thousand neurons to do (including a tiny, low-res, colorless visual cortex and olfactory system that maintain a tiny, low-res representation of their surroundings).

I'm not dismissing the wonders of nature, just trying to add some detail to a write-up that glosses over _how_ these things are working.

</comment><comment><USER29> Paramecia manage to do quite a lot without any brains at all [1]. They do have microtubules though [2].

[1] [https://www.ebiomedia.com/the-biology-classics-paramecium- be...](https://www.ebiomedia.com/the-biology-classics-paramecium- behavior.html)

[2] [http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/studies/invertebrates/micr...](http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/studies/invertebrates/microtubules.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> It's astonishing to me that on the one hand the article upends what had been common sense with experimental results, but then blithely goes on and makes assertions about the nature of cognition based on no other justification than it being the au courant model.

</comment><comment><USER31> Carpenter Ants have a mind and are aware of adult sized predators following them (no harm became the ants).

</comment><comment><USER32> Heuristics. Lots of them.</comment>


Card Trick Leaves Penn and Teller Puzzled - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvW7-019XLQ

<comment><USER2> What happened to the audio at around 2:20? Does he say something that gets censored?</comment>


Clojure 2011 Year in Review - <AUTHOR> http://stuartsierra.com/2012/01/03/clojure-2011-year-in-review <comment><USER2> How could you forget Noir and Korma? ;)

<http://www.webnoir.org> <http://www.sqlkorma.com>

<comment><USER3> I would like to add seesaw ( <https://github.com/daveray/seesaw> ) to the list.

It is a nice lispy wrapper over Swing for writing GUI apps (in a fairly declarative style).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am interested in learning clojure. Unfortunately the learning material online is very scanty.

Also the material is very dry. If you have never programmed in a Lisp language before it all looks greek and latin. This tends to be a problem with most Lisp books. They very soon go into the great aspects of Lisp.

As a beginner, I need to be shown how to do the regular stuff in Lisp. Like other languages tutorials.

One of the reason I like Python is really for the awesome documentation on their website.

Now the thing about clojure, is due to sheer interest and passion alone. I am being forced to take additional pain to continuously search and learn. Others may not do the same. If the barrier to entry is too high, you will scare away new comers. Especially Lisp new comers.

All Advanced Hackery is OK, but teach me the basic stuff first. I need to learn the if/else, for/do/while , functions, IO, regular expressions, Battery usage, socket etc kind of stuff.

After I'm through with this, you can rant as much about macros as you want, and I'm all ears.

But directly going to all this advanced hackery without me even knowing how to do my day-to-day tasks is what has kept Lisp in the lower side of usage.

It will be sad if clojure goes down this route.

<comment><USER5> I found making my own notes, and playing around doing things I've done before in other more familiar languages, while reading this:

<http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html>

..to been a nice soft introduction. Now I'm intending to go through The Joy Of book, but with more familiarity than last time I tackled it (and fell flat on my face!).

Yes, it's dry, but it's also very straightforward. Using the repl in another window while looking it over was key though. It really does become much more clear what's going on when you manually type everything out, and then poke bits of it with a stick until it clicks.

<comment><USER4> _The Joy Of book, but with more familiarity than last time I tackled it (and fell flat on my face!)_

I am facing the same problem. I tend to run into that problem, because the moment I see some non regular programming aspect being discussed at length it becomes a little boring. Also I can't co relate that with my practical experiences.

I enjoyed functional programming thanks to Mark Jason Dominus's "Higher Order Perl". Which taught me all functional programming stuff in the most pragmatic way out.

Now that is what I look for, material that teaches me all this great stuff in the framework of my real work. Then it becomes really enjoyable and graspable.

<comment><USER5> Just glancing through, these look like great problems to tackle while learning any new language, and I might have a go at just that - translating them to clojure, and looking at docs as I go. If you're interested in doing something similar, my mail is my name at gmail. (You probably know the material a lot better than I though!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clojure is on my list of languages to learn in 2012. I really dig the community and the fact that it runs on the JVM. I've been looking for a strong functional language to use for backends as an alternative to using Node, and Clojure seems to be the right fit for that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice Clojure Year. One of my goals with clojure is to do more acctual programming in clojure and less reading and testing out stuff.</comment>


How do you explain dimensions greater than 3, to a 5 year old? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Physics/How-do-you-explain-dimensions-greater-than-3-to-a-5-year-old

<comment><USER2> Enlighten the unenlightened here for a second...

Why would you even _want_ to explain higher-order dimensions to a 5 year old?

I don't know all that many 5 year olds, in all honesty, but I don't know that I know ANY of them that I'd ever need to explain multi-dimensional space-time (or multi-dimensional mathematics, depending on what you want to call a "dimension").

C'mon, the kid's still very new to the world. They're barely comfortable with three dimensions at this point in their lives.

I understand that this question may have been posed simply as a rubber duck scenario, but even still, that'd be my first response.

</comment><comment><USER3> What did the box look like _before_ your brother jumped on it?

What did the box look like _after_ your brother jumped on it?

(It's the same box, right?)</comment>


Ask HN: Which Firefox addons you can't live without - <AUTHOR>

I was reading the discussion on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1359220 and found that I had never heard of the Tree Style Tab and some other addons a few people were talking about. SO I was wondering what all great addons I might be missing.<p>I have flashblock, delicious, IE Tabs, Firebug and JS debugger installed on my firefox. <comment><USER2> Firebug and Download Helper are my two must haves. TamperData is a good one too, when Firebug isn't quite giving me enough information about what's crossing the wire. Also if you're using a proxy server I'd recommend FoxyProxy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends, I have several profiles for doing different things. These are the ones that survived so far, so they must be the ones that are important("can't live without" is a strong phrase)

\- Normal use: Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, Flashblock, Greasemonkey, Session Manager, TreeStyleTabs and User Agent Switcher.

\- Development: Firebug, Httpfox, User Agent Switcher, Web Developer and YSlow

I separate them because of performance reasons and because the dev profile needs to be cleared frequently and so on..

</comment><comment><USER4> Regular use: \- FaviconizeTab (reduces a tab's width to just its favicon) \- Tab Mix Plus (better tab management and session management) \- Google Reader Watcher \- oldbar (single line design in the URL bar) \- Menu Editor (ability to remove all unnecessary options from my context menu and others) \- Screen Grab (fast saving/copying of screenshots)

Development: \- Firebug \- Page Speed \- YSlow

</comment><comment><USER5> <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/>

BarTab. I normally have a ton of tabs open (Anywhere between 15 and 45) Without BarTab, Firefox starts noticeably chugging, but with BarTab I can unload most of the tabs from memory.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sharethis: I like using the bit.ly integration

Rapportive: Great Gmail plugin that replaces the ad area with information on who e-mailed you / scrapes their online profile and twitter feeds.

</comment><comment><USER7> All-in-One Gestures saves me a good bit of time. It's the one addon I find myself missing when I'm not on my computer.

Using the scroll wheel to switch between tabs in the bar = priceless.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am still a huge fan of the ubiquity project. Still love being able to invoke what is basically quicksilver in my browser.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rikaichan - if you're not fluent in Japanese but use Japanese sites, it's a lifesaver

</comment><comment><USER10> Vimperator - gives me vim keys on FF.

Adblock

</comment><comment><USER11> measureit</comment>


Sleeping Barber: Clojure x Scala - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.clj/2009/09/scala-vs-clojure-round-2-concurrency.html <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who see's this as blatant link bait?

I only read part 2 but he's either not doing this seriously or he's overconfident in his thinking abilities.

<comment><USER3> He does come across as smug, but as far as I can see, the clojure version is indeed both smaller and correct compared to the longer and buggy scala version.

What do you think he's missing?

<comment><USER4> He's comparing Actors to STM, not Scala to Clojure.

I'd be more interested in a comparison of Clojure's STM to ScalaSTM (<http://nbronson.github.com/scala-stm/index.html>).

<comment><USER3> This is true, but to be fair, rightly or wrongly those are the technologies that are put forward by the designers as the primary solution for concurrency problems in the respective languages.

ScalaSTM looks good though and the comparison would be interesting.

<comment><USER4> The philosophy behind Clojure is that there is a right way of doing things and a wrong way of doing things, and Clojure won't let you do things the way it considers to be wrong.

The philosophy behind Scala is that you can do whatever you want. It might nudge you in certain directions, but it won't force you. The language is designed to be flexible enough to support several paradigms. Actors was a demonstration of this: you can build some of the syntax and semantics of Erlang actors into Scala as a library, rather than a core feature of the language. Likewise with ScalaSTM: it's purely a library, rather than a core feature of the language.

If you pick a problem that's well suited to STM, you can use STM in Scala. If you pick a problem that's well suited to Actors, you can use Actors in Scala. If you pick the wrong tool for the problem, well, then yes, you'll find yourself in a lot of pain.

<comment><USER3> The Scala philosophy of actors just being a demonstration has been somewhat lost when you look at the literature, where Actors are presented as a solid solution.

STM doesn't really exist in Scala except as an experiment, so you cannot use it in Scala unless you're prepared to seek out the experimental library.

Yes, yes, I know it's planned for inclusion and code is being tested, but that's not the same as shipping today in the base library. I agree that Scala is all about flexibility "a scalable language" etc, but in practice we're talking about comparing a future Scala feature with today's Clojure.

I don't see how you can say that Clojure 'won't let you' use actors. It would seem to me just as easy to implement an actors library in Clojure as to implement STM in Scala. Rich Hickey has even suggested himself that Actors may show up for use in distributed systems in a future Clojure.

My point is that this is a reasonable comparison between the current versions of the languages that most people are likely to encounter. If a journeyman programmer has a concurrency problem to solve in each of the languages today, they'll be guided towards the STM system in Clojure, and the Actors library in Scala.

The original article which compares the two is actually quite insightful in exposing difficulties with using Actors. Given that the solution was taken from a prominent book on Scala and not contrived by the author, it's hardly a strawman. Why did the authors of the O'Reilly book pick actors if they're a bad choice?

If they're doing it wrong, it would be useful to explain why, than to just shoot the comparison down by saying Scala can do _anything_ once the appropriate library has been written.

<comment><USER4> ScalaSTM is hardly experimental. Its reference implementation is based on CCSTM, which has been around for a while now. CCSTM was built by Nathan Bronson, who spent a good chunk of his working life building several transactional memory systems for use in the financial industry. Now he's at Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab, where he's built CCSTM and is part of the ScalaSTM expert group. I would have no qualms using ScalaSTM in production today.

Whether it is or isn't shipped with the "base library" seems like a red herring. Scala, today, supports the language features necessary to support ScalaSTM. Whether that's packaged and distributed with the language seems superfluous.

I never said Clojure won't let you use Actors. I said Clojure won't let you do things it considers to be wrong (e.g., mutable state shared between threads).

Like I said, this blog post was a comparison between Actors and STM, and I would have been more interested in seeing a comparison between Clojure's STM and ScalaSTM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        for (i <_- style="color: #afeeee; font-weight: bold;" span="span" _="_" _20="_20" to="to" _1="_1">val customer = new Customer(i)

??

It took me a minuet to figure out that was a bug in the HTML page, and not some obscure scala syntax i haven't seen yet ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> For whoever misses part 1:

[http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.clj/2009/09/scala-vs- clojure...](http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.clj/2009/09/scala-vs-clojure-lets- get-down-to-business.html)</comment>


Why can't we do better than these crappy torrent sites? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/25/zombie_torrents/

<comment><AUTHOR> My feeling is that better solutions would require user registration, and thus exist largely on either private torrent sites, or not at all (because people don't want to hand over details when doing illegal things).</comment>


Andy Rutledge Redesigns NYTimes.com - <AUTHOR> http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php <comment><USER2> Obviously he's not a NYT reader. I love the times. It's not broken. Their website is fantastic in every way. You can spend hours upon hours on it and digest more content, in whatever style you wish to navigate. It has a certain unity within the chaos. But it's not really chaos. The content is the layout. You won't find any other News organization who understands design more than NYT. They let the content design the layout, not the other way around.

Andy turned NYT into a Wordpress blog. :|

I'll give him credit for the work though, but I personally think NYT is an exception. But go ahead, every other news website, you have Cart Blanche.

cc: Khoi Vinh

<comment><USER3> I feel the same. I think the NYT's online page is fantastic - so much so that I pay $16 a month for it. I think they do an excellent job of laying out pages online yet still feeling like a _newspaper_. I _like_ looking around the page for different stories, just as I would in a newspaper page. It's engaging, and I can't help but scan the whole page, read the headline, check out the picture captions.

When I look at his blog-style page, my eyes just glaze over the headlines.

The NYT App on the iPhone is basically his mobile mockup. And I've found that even on my iPhone, I'd rather look at the proper front page.

<comment><USER4> I thought it was $8 a week?

<comment><USER5> That's for the "All Access" package which nets you a tablet app and a smartphone app. The cheapest package is $3.75 a week.

I would have subscribed, but they gave me a free year after introducing the paywall.

<comment><USER4> Actually I did not realize that. Thanks for that clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know everybody hates ads, but it only reinforces the "naive businessmen" stereotype of designers when people say stuff like this:

"Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages."

That's like saying because you pay for magazines they also don't need to have ads. That's in no way at all how the content business works.

<comment><USER7> Newspapers made the mistake of devaluing their ad inventory by increasing their supply. There's a really good – business – argument to be made for cutting the number of ad slots on the page.

<comment><USER8> You shouldn't underestimate how much newspapers know about the economics of their inventory. In many ways, ad slots are price discrimination. Companies that want 100% share of voice (ie: no one else gets ads on the page) will pay a premium to get it. A small company may just buy a cheaper ad slot at the bottom of the page. They have thousands of permutations on how they can sell ads, and they _will_ shut off as many slots as necessary to get a premium campaign going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is easy to create a redesign for a website. It is less easy to pivot a billion-dollar business which has the agility of an aircraft carrier while she is sinking. If your answer to that question is "What do we really need the planes for, anyway?" and "I think the conning tower would look much better in teal.", you might find a wee bit of difficulty getting taken seriously.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. One thing the author conveniently forgot to take into account is the performance of the current site. If you don't have access to actual usage data such as heatmaps, click rates, page browsing times, you are quite likely shooting yourself in the foot just for the sake of beautifying the website.

He could argue that he was consciously only looking at the design aspect and that would also be a mistake. You can't isolate performance and design for a site. And when it comes to business, function takes precedence over beauty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was involved in a major redesign of the BBC News Website - when it went form a sigle column approach to the current two-dimensional layout.

What is interesting about Andy's designs is that he's basically taken the current thinking in 'modern' news website design (two dimensions) back to the single column layout. I think this is a fundamental flaw in his design.

People come to a news front page to see the editor's prioritization of the days news agenda. With a single column approach it is very difficult to editorially prioritize stories of similar importance. It works for blogs because they don't have an editorial prioritization as they usually sort by chronological order.

Two-dimensional layouts, like NY Times and BBC, allow for editors to give several articles (perhaps a politics story, a business story and a sport story) equal visual importance. If you have a mainstream appeal you need to be able to give different audiences something of relevance.

</comment><comment><USER12> The final result looks nice, but I hate these exercises, because if you are not fitting the same number of ads in the page, then you are not actually solving the same problem. You are solving a much easier problem, as almost all sites look better without ads.

Also, there's a major divide between what people seem to think looks nice and what seems to succeed. The Huffington Post is the biggest example of recent success in the news realm. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/>

Is that despite of its design or because of it? I don't know. It's hard to separate out the effect of the editorial content from presentation.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't like the final result, and Rutledge dismisses many of the realities of site design.

I think the existing NYTimes site is among the examplars of good Web news site design. My principle gripe is that there's too much whitespace around the primary content. That's probably a consequence of both a 1920x1080 display (laptop), and highly aggressive ad blocking. (Yeah, yeah. I'll stop blocking ads when advertisers stop being complete f _ckwits about making annoying ads, and/or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.)

There are a few valid points Rutlege makes. Many of the navigation elements are little (or never) used by me, including the left and top sidebars.

_I want my microcontent.* That means a brief story summary. I have an RSS reader and subscribe to the NY Time site on it. I rarely read it. Why? _Because there's no microcontent._ For most news stories, the first paragraph is all I need (actually, in all absolute truth, the headline itself is far too much). If I want to read more, that paragraph really helps make the decision to do so. Jacob Nielson's covered this topic very well.

Presenting the content on the homepage, while making for dense page, does make a good jump point. My eye can scan far more quickly than I can click back and forth through pages.

The classic wastes of time for me on the Times are:

\- Video content. Really, text tells the story far more quickly most of the time. A video feature can be a benefit (and for some rare stories it's hugely useful), but I _don't_ think it belongs on the homepage.

\- The "Talking Heads" features. There's something in how these are set up that frequently makes for a compelling lede, but fails to deliver. The format just doesn't work for me.

\- The formulaic three-headlines-per-section on the front page. Some days some sections deserve far more news, and some sections (sorry, but "Dining", "Fashion", and "Automobiles" hold little or no interest) deserve none. To me.

Rutledge has succeeded in vastly simplifying the Times's front page. _By removing most of the informational content and utility from it._ His design works for mobile (and as he notes, the Times has a good mobile site). It's not a good full-featured site design.

<comment><USER14> Video content brings in 20x the ad rate of display ads. The news agency I worked for had a "push video for all content" stance because of this, I assume all other news sites have the same stance.

You bring up the biggest argument of them all, I had it every day with the site I was responsible for. I'm a minimalist myself, and the person I reported to was a everything and the kitchen sink guy. We had some heated arguments followed by days of ignoring each other LOL

I hated his approach, but our numbers did suggest many people landed to the front page each morning and read the whole thing. So having a lot of information and links on the page is very important. So assume your behavior validated as normal viewing behavior. Behavior changes through out the day though which sucks LOL

And the most amazing thing was user testing is near useless, the demographics, experiences, behaviors are so vast. Even as noted the time of day has a huge effect on readers.

So no matter what you do you isolate a community, so you compromise and compromise, and produce the most average pile of junk anyone has ever seen. But people understand it, sure they moan, but they get it. Go for the lowest common denominator.

The times uses the motif of a news paper online, I guess because it's contextually people understand. I don't know if by design or accident, but there is a level if usability there because of the fact.

Its messy but its reliable, and sometimes thats what design is about, not a great looking product, but something that does its job.

<comment><USER13> The lifesaver for me has been the "Remove This Permanently" Firefox plugin (well, that an the Flashblock plugin).

If something's sufficiently annoying, I just find its xpath and remove it.

Does this put me in the top fractional 1% of browsers? I have no doubt. Does this work for me? Yes. Does the 1% bit bother me? Not in the least.

If anything, it's the final trump card in an argument I've had with web-design geeks that the end-user ultimately trumps style.

Video very likely does bring in the money. I can live with that. But so long as I can rip out the offending content, I'm cool with it.

I've also seen some other good/bad paper designs. In the Bay Area, I'm continually amazed at how good the _design_ of the SF Chronicle is (the content's of course gone fully to crap), and how poor that of the San Jose Mercury News (in the capital of Silicon Valley) is. I actually did an analysis of how much (and respectively little) content was presented above the fold in each design.

Sadly each, even in their online incarnation, is becoming increasingly irrelevant and local-focus blogs/news services are emerging.

On the topic -- if you haven't read John Sealy Brown's _Information Rules_, I'd highly recommend his section on the community-binding element of newspapers (and sports teams). It's a strong indictment of micro-targeted / individualized news streams.

<comment><USER14> I've found ghostery and ad block plus do the trick for me :)

<comment><USER13> Cool, I've added ghostery, will play w/ it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Andy's redesign is a disaster for various reasons stated by others, but this is possibly the most important and underlying reason for its failure: The existing design _visually demonstrates_ that _'there's a lot going on here'._ His does not.

He failed to communicate the _good_ type of busyness in his re-imagining -- the redesign makes the site look like a five-articles-a-day blog.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. nytimes.com gives the visual impression of being dense with fresh content and that's what keeps news junkies coming back for more.

His redesign not only lacks compelling visuals (huffingtonpost.com wins that category, sorry but tabloid style is here to stay) but also advertising: still a necessary evil, got to make room for the ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well having been in the person in charge of a major news website myself I can say we all have lovely designs like this pinned to the walls next our desks.

And while I really like his designs and have turned to Andy many times for inspiration, there are some serious context problems... and while I'm bored and off work I might as well write a critique...

I had an near identical sports section to the one he designed pinned to me wall. But I can say he's screwed a few things up, gallery needs to be higher, users can't find a gallery that low (I know user testing surprises them hell out me to), no ads again. To use templating that image has to be shrunk, the quality you get through from external sources if often extremely poor, a reality he doesn't seem to have considered. Nothing screams amateur news like big pixalated images some non technical journo uploaded, and credibility is your only asset really.

Another reality is the business requires as many ad units as you can fit on a page, big media is expensive. Way more than a blog with 10 or so staff. Flying people all over the country, investigating stories, hotel rooms. Its like covering CES every day, which for most tech blogs would be there biggest yearly expense. Moan all you will but most people are out of touch with exact what it takes to make decent news.

And you can't win an argument about ads, you get dragged in front of finance, and if you convince them sales will drag you in front of the board, if you win that you get dragged in front of agencies to justify changes which may effect upcoming campaigns. Its a horrible process and really have to have solid arguments and research, essentially you are risking entire revenue streams, for what in a lot of cases isn't even break even business.

He's got what appears to be a lot of promoted content, thats expensive from a support point of view. I had a guy working under me whose job was literally to make the decision about what story superseeded the next.

The back lash you get from people for having a story up too long or not long enough is amazing. I've been called every name under the sun. Your audience isn't a defined well behaved demographic at all. Its like 4chan discussing politics, just a complete mess always on the attack.

..but at least when thanks comes its usually really good, for example this year I got a hand made Christmas card from the Indonesian Fishing Association for getting a reporter in touch with them. Somehow it made up for a year of insults. It was real touching.

The only real solution, and we worked damned hard with Google on this is indexing getting people to the page directly, forgetting all about overview pages and landing pages.

We ended up constructing a 24 hour social media team. We pushed the news via automation, blood, sweat, and tears to the people. And Google rewarded us, we entered the elite list of news suppliers whom google monitor for breaking stories. It works, it really does, but its hard work. I bet there aren't many people hear who have brought Google employees to an argument with your boss ;)

Anyway he's also under estimating the sheer volume of stories being generated. He's designed a nice blog template, not something that produces several hundred of stories a day over dozens and dozens of subsection. He's hasn't considered the scale, and the unreliability of content. You can do editorial pages like that for major events, but not the daily drab. The real solution to the problem was as noted above social engineering, you need to get people (super nodes) who act as conduits to propagate good stories for you.

The next is the infographics. Again beautiful, I used to kill for decent info graphics coming in. If I wasn't snowed under I'd try and create them myself.

But the reality is graphic designer can't do it, they have huge work loads already, and remember you can't just hire more staff, its break even business. THEN you need a subject matter expert to assembly it and give it to the graphic designer.

Infographics takes time, and its something that Google and Twitter have taken away from news journalists by the creation of an attention economy. You need to break a story immediately or you run the risk of not covering your production costs.

You don't have time to crunch numbers, you are literally scrambling for eyeballs to stay in business. You can do it with editorials fine, and one trick I learnt quick was guest bloggers are GOLD. They often bring a crowd with them, they often have great researched stories, infographics you name it. So it became my goal to build those relationships.

But alas 3 months without weekends, high pressure workload, high pressure targets, unyielding worldwide competition take a toll. So I quit. Theres still an open position for me if I want to return, but I don't think I'm ready just yet ;)

EDIT: I don't mean to be harsh towards Andy. I love his work, and his intellectual exercise into improvement is great. I even forwarded it onto my old team for review.

But what I guess my point is sometimes there a reason why things are crap, and fixing may be a hell of a lot harder the moment you try than you expected.

So don't judge people/teams to harshly, instead offer a hand like Andy has done, sometimes they need it (especially in big media)

<comment><USER14> Also probably worth mentioning while on the subject all my research and experience added up to designs that are very close to Al Jeezera.

Perhaps I just favor it because it resembles my own thinking but I believe they have one of the best designed news sites out there: <http://english.aljazeera.net>

Clean, crisp, clear, all gridded up nice and tidy. Handling information overload well.

Being a new kid on the block, no legacy systems or clients to contended with, learning from every one else's mistakes I assume play a huge part in why Al Jeezera looks so good.

If I can remember the worst news site I've seen I'll post it. Its a state level TV station from America somewhere, shocking abuses in design. It was like trying to read at a pocket dictionary from 10 feet away, total text chaos.

<comment><USER17> One of the best online newspaper designs I've seen recently is the Indian paper The Hindu (<http://www.thehindu.com/>). While most Indian newspapers will give you eye-cancer just by looking at them (ex: The Times of India, which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country also has one of the most horrible online editions, plastered with spammy ads and horrible layout). The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. (The original design was like a 1995 webpage)

Also up there in my list is NPR (<http://www.npr.org/>) and PBS (<http://www.pbs.org/>). Not technically newspapers, but their pages are mostly about news delivery.

<comment><USER18> The Hindu looked bad too, a couple of years ago. They started testing a new interface at beta.thehindu.com for sometime before using the new interface for everyone.

 _The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign._ True.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dear god, where to start. I worked on the Times web site for 7 years (dev, not design). Before I even saw his "redesign" I read his preamble. First, lets be clear, he is working from the wrong assumptions. He demonstrates clearly what is wrong with many news outlets but then he lumps the Times in with them too. Since his piece is about the Times I have to feel all assertions he makes are about that too, and not just media in general.

      Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken.

No its not. The business model is broken. Print is declining. Online revenue is being experimented with. Could be better, could be much worse.

      Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in
      favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in
      place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards
      for misdirection and whatever consensus defines
      as forgivable.

Please don't lump the Times in this category. They have a small amount of clearly stated _Editorial_ content. Separate from that is the _Opinion_ pages, and what is completely separate from that is _News_ (thats the bit where they try their damnedest to keep Opinion out of it and cite sources, provide analysis and present facts).

      And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for
      news design on a monitor or device screen these days.

We'll get to this part...

      In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets
      seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity
      and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model
      that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash
      of pink noise…which they call content.

Actually that "broken profit model" isn't broken for some but thats another argument. If you have ever sat in a newsroom meeting, or a design review, or a meeting where product people spar with editorial who spar with developers you would realize that dignity is a big deal. A big _FUCKING_ deal. You might not like the fruits of that but don't never say they don't give a shit. The Times prizes content to a fault.

      In an effort to disguise and mitigate the fact that they
      have little idea how to publish digital content
      properly—often sneakily called "differentiation"—some
      news outlets release apps for digital devices. These
      apps typically (but not always) do a better job of
      presenting content and facilitating navigation, but
      they're a band aid on a festering abdominal wound.
      Digital media is simply digital media; if you do it
      right you publish once and it works anywhere. If you're
      using an app to deliver content, you're doing it wrong.

First, its not clear that this criticism is Times specific. However its still wrong. I've been in plenty of meetings with bright people from inside and outside the company where we started off with the goal that, as he put it, "if you do it right you publish once and it works anywhere". It didn't work. These were not just "old media" types either - these are talented people, some of whom who don't even read the print edition. _gasp_

Its something thats very easy to say - hell I wish it were true. It is not. Devices, apps, platforms, whatever. They have strengths and weaknesses. You can not have one magic solution for all. This is a crappy comparison but its a bit like saying you have one single car for every type of terrain - same car for soccer-mom and deer-hunter alike! Sweet!

      Instead of working with a handful of redundant,
      mitigating formats (websites, mobile sites, apps, etc...)
      for content delivery to popular devices, news
      organizations should simply deliver it correctly in
      the first place, one time; using html, css, JavaScript,
      ...oh, and design. The employment of content design
      would be quite refreshing, actually.

Sadly, this is very much an example of a person looking in. I'm not sure how to counter this. Its simply a matter of not knowing what happens on the 7th floor of the Times Building. Nor could he. However I can only assure you that a very dedicated group of Designers are actively working on NYTimes.com and they know their shit.

There is definitely a crap load of work to do to fully redesign a web site that was last done in 2005 - but it does happen. A couple of URLs come to mind which are not illustrated in his piece:

 _Opinion_ (redesigned last year)

<http://www.nytimes.com/opinion/>

[http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/25/how- budget-c...](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/25/how-budget-cuts- will-change-the-black-middle-class?ref=opinion)

<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/opinion/26brooks.html>

 _Times Skimmer_

<http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/#/Top+News>

 _Books / Best Sellers List_

[http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/combined-print- and...](http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/combined-print-and-e-book- fiction/list.html)

 _T Magazine_ (CHECK THIS ONE OUT - you seem to have missed it Andy!)

<http://www.nytimes.com/pages/t-magazine/index.html>

<http://www.nytimes.com/gst/tmagazine/video/index.html>

 _Dealbook Blog_

<http://dealbook.nytimes.com/>

 _Business Day Sectionfront_

<http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/index.html>

 _LENS Blog_

<http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/>

 _Times Machine_

<http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser>

 _Opinionator Blog_ (my favorite design)

<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/>

Slide Show (Great Homes)

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/20/greathomesandd...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/20/greathomesanddestinations/20110721_eastberlin.html#6)

So whats next... well too much actually. I do not have the time nor the patience to dig at all of Andys points. Im sure not all of them are bad, but there is enough there to make me wonder whats wrong with this guy. Again, he is a professional. I am sure he has had critics of his work, and he knows that there was an inner process where a lot of those points were brought up and shown not to hold water. He is now doing the same thing.

So I'll leave it on one final point. Mobile Sites. Its an example of what happens when you don't know that the Times is aware of his point and we discussed it and there was a damn good reason we made the decision that we made.

What am I talking about? He shows the iPhone with the full NYT homepage and has the caption "Um, are you frisking kidding me?". In other words why not a mobile site.

Well, very simple. The iPhone is capable of rendering and interacting with the full page. It was the first browser to do so - it don't require a lite version. You could tap, zoom, pinch, drag and get the full depth of the page. Other browsers - like those for Nokia, RIM etc couldn't handle that.

This was talked over to death. There were compelling arguments about going down this road - or not. In the end, the decision was made to NOT redirect those advanced browsers to the mobile site. You can still go to m.nyt.com if you like, we just wont force you too.

      but it should not require anything more than a media
      query fetching different CSS and perhaps some additional
      scripting so as to simply restyle the content experience

Andy does say that all you need is media quires for the CSS and such and bingo. Well, no. No its not that simple. If you want to redo the homepage for a specific mobile experience then you probably want to serve different sized images, maybe not have some Flash stuff on the iPhone, maybe drop the bandwidth intensive stuff that works well on desktop.

CSS media queries does not solve the problem. It is never that easy and shame on your for saying so. You are a professional. You should know better. Bad Andy. Bad. No biscuit for you.

Man, this makes me bitter. _RANT OFF_.

<comment><USER20> _"In the end, the decision was made to NOT redirect those advanced browsers to the mobile site. You can still go to m.nyt.com if you like, we just wont force you too."_

Thank you so much. Seriously. It's extremely rare for it to ever be enjoyable to use a "mobile" site on an iPhone. At least for me.

I feel like sending you a cake.

I wish there were some way to disguise the iPhone as a PC, so that no website automatically redirects me to any mobile version ever.

EDIT: For example, I just got an email saying I've been tagged in a photo on Facebook. So I go to facebook.com on my iPhone, and they've managed to _completely break scrolling_ in their mobile version. I literally cannot scroll down on any page. 100% certain, and 100% aggravating --- and as far as I can tell, no way for me to get to the full site.

<comment><USER19> I agree completely. I'm not sure its best for everyone but that is also my preference too.

Send a cake. I'm in Seattle now but you could send a cake to the designers on the 7th floor.

      NYTimes.com Design Group
      c/o Angela Rutherford
      The New York Times
      620 8th Ave (7th floor)
      New York, NY 10018

Tell them to invite the Developers from the 8th floor too, and the Interactive News Group on the 2nd.

Add a brief note on any design/ux tweaks you'd like :)

 _Cake = (!Lie) ? Motivation : Lie_

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't it be even better if we could send the cake to one floor, and have the designers, developers, and content team all work together? :)

<comment><USER19> I couldn't agree more. If we had that I might have stayed - or gotten a hell of a lot more done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >The Times politics page. I think the object of the game must be to fit as much "content" onto the page as possible in an effort to overwhelm the reader, tricking them into believing that the NY Times is just bursting with a mindbogglingly-bottomless array of important information. If only the reader could learn to ignore 60% of what's here, she might have a chance at a pleasant experience. Please stop helping. What you've got here is not content, but noise.

You can't get a good coverage of world events in the number of items that Rutledge wants. The world is noisy, and what Rutledge is suggesting vastly oversimplifies. I'm sure it would convert wonderfully, raise ad revenue, all that. It wouldn't be good journalism. Even if the NYT is full of pointless noise, it's still better than a handful of painstakingly crafted articles. A handful of pretty, well-formed articles cannot accurately reflect a disordered world. If the NYT isn't noisy it's not doing its job.

</comment><comment><USER23> As one of the designers of a major news organization redesign, it's very nice to do a pretty page but to honestly think you can get away with no ads is a not only a losing battle but one that doesn't take the needs of the client seriously.

I also like how the NYT's website looks like a newspaper with a variety of content. The redesign looks like a Wordpress template.

</comment><comment><USER24> The iPhone example is funny because Apple themselves used the New York Times as the example in their "it's not the mobile Internet ... it's just the Internet" advertisement.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzV-W_6WOm0>

</comment><comment><USER25> so, remove the ads... and replace them with infographics?

forgive me for being crass but this whole post seems naive. don't get me wrong, it's pretty; but we're talking about the new york times. i think this is more accurately "andy rutledge redesigns nyt for andy rutledge". which is fine, but not at all the same thing.

"broken news" is a big claim. i'm not sure a sleek blog theme is going to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I really think this looks amazing. It would likely function amazingly well, too.

However, for this to work, you have to eliminate the space for ads. To deal with this, Rutledge suggests "Quality news is subscription only. You pay for valuable information. Fluff you get for free."

I somehow don't think it's that simple.

If you slam the digital door shut (much more than it is now at the Times), and only allow subscriber access, you'll do two things:

(1) vastly reduce your readership; if you want to go back to showing ads, you can't, because you no longer can brag about the vast numbers reading your website daily (2) create a hyper-focused pirating scheme around disseminating NYTimes content for free

I love news. I love good reporting. When I'm no longer a student, I'll pay to get the Times at home. BUT, we've got a serious problem here; this design, while well thought-out, fails to acknowledge that it can't exist (eliminating ads) without changing the industry (changing readership drastically).

I very much look forward to seeing this movie: [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/page_one_inside_the_new_york...](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/page_one_inside_the_new_york_times/) which touches on these issues.

</comment><comment><USER27> Martin Belam (IA guy at the Guardian) wrote an excellent rebuttal to this yesterday. [http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2011/07/andy-news- redux.ph...](http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2011/07/andy-news-redux.php)

</comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only one who thinks his 'redesign' just looks like any other blog?

<comment><USER29> "Newer isn't better. Better is better."

Sometimes it takes courage to put forward a design that doesn't have the glamour of the new. Things that work well can often be boring.

EDIT: quote is from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2803681>

<comment><USER30> As a total noob in comparison to most readers of HN, I have to totally agree with this sentiment--not that it's a noob idea but I feel like there are very skilled and brilliant people here that want to show the world their amazing talents and sometimes lose sight of things. It reminds me of what I always see on that show with Chef Gordon Ramsey where he's always telling these hot shot Chefs to stop being so cocky with their creations and that simple is often better; no one wants a 58 flavour chocolate creme brulee steak muffin.

Better is Better, but again I think we have to remember, that it's all subjective.

P.S.

Don't let the down votes discourage you. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The problem with such a post is that it violates the first principle of user centered design. _Talk to your users._ Did anyone tell him that NYT is broken? Did he go and ask a single user who goes to NYT everyday to figure out what his problems are? Or saw him use the site.

It's easy to re-design something from outside in. It's much harder to design it inside out when you have a more complete picture of what users are doing and have a rough idea of what they want.

</comment><comment><USER32>
      Popularity has nothing to do with news

If you've been on the internet before, you'll know this is not true.

</comment><comment><USER33> The design has its moments but I actually like NYT. The only thing I would like more is fixed dimensions for items on the front page, maybe 2 column layout with both sides perfectly aligned per item. The draw of newspaper sites is both the quality content within articles but the curation of articles themselves so having everything in uniform lists is too confusing. Additions I wouldn't mind are most tweeted or tweeted by your friends type social media integration.

If design was the only thing killing the newspaper industry their problems would be solved.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think Andy's design is very stylish and presents the content in a tasteful way. I have no significant qualms about his design in any way.

When he goes into business territory, however, he loses his shit. This is the money quote:

"Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages. Story pages could still have one or two tastefully- presented ads, but preservation of the content is what will keep readers happy, engaged, and willing to continue paying their subscriptions…just like in olden times."

People didn't pay for news in the olden times. They paid for printing and distribution, and then the advertisement covered the rest, with some tiny variations on that theme. Not significantly different from today.

If you were to make the content subscription only, and some publications have tried this recently, you'd lose 90% of your readers. That means also losing 90% of your ad revenue. Now the remaining 10% of your readers need to make up for that loss. That makes it a rather expensive subscription, losing a lot more subscribers, and around it goes, the vicious circle.

That doesn't mean digital news isn't horribly broken, it is. Just that making it subscription only isn't the solution.

<comment><USER5> ... The NYT uses a subscription model these days (though you get a handful of articles for free every month). That's what he was talking about. He was still wrong from a business point of view though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Andy's designs look beautiful, but I'm reminded of the old saying: "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy".

I'm afraid that if you take his designs as a starting point, and revise them based on the needs of the NYTimes and the expectations of its millions of visitors, they would require a large number of changes and would more closely resemble the current NYTimes.com

</comment><comment><USER36> The one thing I dislike (on the main page at least) is the separation of news and opinion/analysis. I can't think of many times where I've visited a news site and wanted to read only opinion or only news, but I can think of times where I've visited a site to read about a particular story - and read related articles that happen to be opinions/analysis.

</comment><comment><USER37> I suspect that while this is a reasonable and logical redesign, it misses out on some non-rational behavior of the majority of people who read news. I know that, non rationally, I quite like a bit of "jumble" from my newspapers and news sites so I can just "wander" around from thing to thing for a while. The redesign showed here turns it more into a blog and I think I'd have trouble wandering around it.. I'd need to know what I was looking for.

I dislike the Daily Mail but I know their site is almost entirely driven by numbers and what catches on (and what doesn't): <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/> \- it has a certain formula to it but it still has an element of randomness and chaos because, I suspect, that's what readers are going for, whether we like it or not.

</comment><comment><USER38> He designed a blog... the whole of NYTimes ist not a blog.

</comment><comment><USER39> Andy is a talented designer, but his style shows through a bit too strongly here. He knows how to utilize whitespace to create an aesthetically pleasing visual flow, but I don't think he pays enough respect the essence of a newspaper—namely _density_ of information.

</comment><comment><USER40> To me it is incredibly important that an abstract is presented up front before I click through to the article. For other news sites (like CNN) that are more about breaking news and less about well written and researched journalism - just the headline is fine (because chances are the article won't say much more than the headline).

NYT's strength is that it is a professional journalistic organization and thus taking words _off_ the page would only serve to betray the value that the NYT offers.

</comment><comment><USER41> Not to be a pain, the design is good, but there's no place to actually put an ad, considering the advertisements are one of their sources of revenue

<comment><USER42> Indeed, tastefully weaving ads into a design is on of the prime challenges of web designers in the real world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> _I think the object of the game must be to fit as much "content" onto the page as possible in an effort to overwhelm the reader, tricking them into believing that the NY Times is just bursting with a mindbogglingly-bottomless array of important information._

That's just what paper newspapers look like. I don't think that's an accident, either.

</comment><comment><USER44> "Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages. Story pages could still have one or two tastefully- presented ads, but preservation of the content is what will keep readers happy, engaged, and willing to continue paying their subscriptions…just like in olden times."

Rutledge hasn't apparently visited the NYT often and maybe hasn't picked up a newspaper in awhile.

1\. Not all of the NYT's traffic is through subscribers: it lets the average user access at least 20 articles a month, and its "paywall" is very permeable.

2\. Even when you pay full price for an issue at the stand, that newspaper still comes with ads. Subscriptions have not accounted for the entirety of newspapers and magazines revenues in a while...

</comment><comment><USER45> A few years ago, I laid out head-to-head comparisons of the top newspapers in the US with and without adblock and noscript. NYTimes, on a screen, is easily the best newspaper. Unfortunately, the pressure of jamming more and more links and stories above the fold seems to have eroded the NYTimes usability.

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0002nk#above-fold)

We should do a poll too: I think a lot of netizens would support NYTimes to the same degree they do NPR, but I don't think the average netizen donates $260 to NPR annually (the price NYTimes is asking for their tablet app).

</comment><comment><USER46> There is no need to redesign when you can read the NYT in basically any format of your choosing with the NYT Skimmer:

<http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/?pagewanted=all#/Top+News>

</comment><comment><USER47> Design is always so much easier when you don't have to incorporate ad spots. Very naive.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is in the vein of just about every 'xx person redesigns yy site'. The elaborate comments from others have done a better job than I could of laying out the details. I don't know why people insist on publishing articles such as these. Oddly, as in in this case, often they end up with a pleasant, but rather common looking, design which is blissfully unaware of all the different constraints and special issues that guided creation of the original.

The conclusion of this article is a rather bland design, in my opinion, which looks like 50 other sites out there and has no space for ads. Hardly worth the wall of text created to herald it.

</comment><comment><USER48> Those look nice, but I still prefer Google News' two-column layout. I can't stand when news organizations try to force everything into a single Twitter- like stream (Google News included).

</comment><comment><USER49> Not entirely different than Yahoo! News is designed on the desktop and on mobile. <http://news.yahoo.com>

<comment><USER50> Exactly, there is already a news site that functions very good on mobile, and it's named Yahoo News. I'd say it's very probable that the author was aware of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> "If you're using an app to deliver content, you're doing it wrong."

He's completely wrong about this. I love the NYT Android app. I can start it at home, while I have decent coverage, and am then able to read the paper any where I am throughout the day, including the subway, because it caches every story on sections you open, even if you don't open those stories. It's one of my favorite Android apps because of this.

</comment><comment><USER52> While we're on the subject, I recently did a news site design myself, even though it's not my main area of expertise (I'm more of a UI designer). I can attest that news sites are probably among the hardest sites to design, since there are so many parameters (and yes, ad units are very important!).

Anyway, I'd love to get some feedback on the design:

<http://thejournal.ie/>

</comment><comment><USER47> Khoi Vinh's just responded with, in part:

"I'm purposefully not identifying this person or the project or providing a link back to the redesign itself, mostly because I think it's counter- productive to continue to reward this effort with more unwarranted attention. To me, it felt less like constructive criticism than link-baiting, and so I have tried to avoid making any public comment."

</comment><comment><USER53> Anyone else see the irony in the fact that the very bottom of Rutledge's web page where this article is found is improperly formatted on the iPhone (background color not extended far enough to the right to cover all offered links). Petty? Yes, but if you're going to blast away at NYT, you better make sure your house is in order.

</comment><comment><USER54> _Digital news is broken_

/rolls eyes.

</comment><comment><USER55> Got to say that is a really beautiful redesign. Someone go and make this functional or i will...

</comment><comment><USER56> Oliver Reichenstein, a swiss/japanese news designer, has been writing about some similar thoughts: <http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/business-class- news/>

</comment><comment><USER57> Seems odd that he points out that the business model is broken.

Yet, doesn't make any room for advertising on his redesigns. The main source of income for most newspapers.

</comment><comment><USER58> Why haven't news sites like this tried the "spotify" model. Where you can pay to have the ads removed?

</comment><comment><USER59> Looks ok, but I'd rather them use shitty design than take advice from a right- wing asshole.

</comment><comment><USER60> For very brief, clean, non partisan news check out 24in60.com. It saves me lots of time and makes news fun for me to read.

<comment><USER60> Hm. This must have looked like self promotion or something -- it wasn't. (It does sort of read that way.) Sorry.</comment></comment>


4th grade school textbook tries to explain electricity, gives up - <AUTHOR> http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/christian_4th_grade_school_textbook_tries_to_explain_electricity/

<comment><USER2> I agree that it's a ridiculous textbook, but these "point and laugh at the stupid believers" articles get a bit tiring sometimes.

I'm in Kansas, a typical family goes to church on Sunday. There are a _lot_ of Christians around here, but I've never come across such a science textbook (you can bet I would have picked it up and looked it in if I had).

To mean anything, the article really should at least _try_ to put some kind of figure on the number of kids actually being educated from this book today. I'm pretty sure it's the exception rather than the rule among Christians to endorse that kind of silly science.

It almost looks like these scientists go out to find the weirdest possible examples they can (and there are some weird ones) and then hold them up as a representative sample. Not a good example of how science should work.

I can't resist linking to this classic article about how even the conventional descriptions of electricity "moves from the negative to the positive" are basically wrong: <http://amasci.com/miscon/elect.html>

<comment><USER3> This book is so over the top, I almost can't imagine it's real, but...

> I can't resist linking to this classic article about how even the > conventional descriptions of electricity "moves from the negative to the > positive" are basically wrong

Or how Ohm's Law or Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation are wrong, for that matter.

But there are varying degrees of wrong, and neither the true direction of charged particles nor superconductors nor relativity can make our sample infractions remotely competitive with those in this book.

And even if they were of the same caliber of wrong, it would not make any of it more right. Kids would be better off simply reading the Bible passages, and not being exposed to the rest of it.</comment></comment>