That would require hella signatures
This is the kind of shit the internet is made for. Boing Boing reports that a buncha people are launching a useless and doomed-to-failure hopefully successful campaign to make the prefix for 1027 “hella.”
For instance: ‘the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts.’ It would also come in handy for eventually measuring Internet traffic and US national debt.
My rough calculations suggest that there are 110 hellamolecules (hover for calculation) comprising No Doubt’s “Rock Steady” album, which contained the song Hella Good. For those who complain that “wicked” is not being considered or that this is “imperialist” or “anglo-centric,” I ask you to have a happy Saturday on another blog.
Youtube auto captioning
Youtube is rolling out automatic captioning on videos! It’s far from perfect, but props to Google for doing something to make their mountains of data accessible to those unable to hear.
My best guess on this is that Google will begin to allow users to suggest and tweak their captioning engine until it gets them much closer to perfect. If you think of the YouTube video library as the world’s biggest collection of natural speech, this could be Google’s ticket to leapfrogging any competitors in natural-language text-to-speech. You might see them allowing users to record and index phone and in-person conversation, a practice that would fall in their typical space of both creepy and awesome.
Secret millionaire gives away $7 million dollars
Now that’s hella dollars! I love this story because it reminds us that money is a means to ends of shelter, experiences, travel, etc. but has no value in and of itself. The ideas that all of us must strive to earn more, that our worth is our economic worth, and that if we had more we would spend more, can quickly become sicknesses. We can’t forget that on a big enough scale, our net worth rounds down to zero.
From the Los Angeles Times:
“She enjoyed other people, and every friend she had was a friend for who she was. They weren’t friends for what she had.”
Groner was born in a small Illinois farming community, but by the time she was 12 both of her parents had died. She and her twin sister, Gladys, were taken in by George Anderson, a member of one of Lake Forest’s leading families.
The Andersons raised the girls and paid for them to attend Lake Forest College. After Groner graduated in 1931, she took a job at nearby Abbott Laboratories, where she worked as a secretary for 43 years.
In 1935 she bought three $60 shares of specially issued Abbott stock and never sold them. The shares split many times over the years, Marlatt said, and Groner reinvested the dividends. Long before she died, her initial outlay had become a fortune.