Meet the Squander Bug
A spider building a fake spider
J. R. R. Tolkien helping the OED define ‘walrus’
The latest and in this case particularly heart–rending mass killing has re-ignited the gun control debate. Though I own a shotgun and enjoy target shooting and the occasional hunting trip, we have to do something about a situation in which any madman with a gun can load up with thousands of bullets. Yes, guns don’t kill people people kill people, but guns make it WAY easier, and huge magazines full of cheap bullets make it easier still.So, a simple proposition: a tax on bullets. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, but gun violence imposes extremely high costs on society. A stiff tax on bullets would make is harder to casually acquire enough bullets to kill 20 six year olds. A box of .223 rounds, the kind used to kill children at Sandy Hook, can be bought online for $9. Let’s quadruple that price.
Tumblr is a weird social network.Like Twitter its content is (very largely) public, and yet like Facebook it’s opaque to social analysis. Follower counts aren’t public or accessible. Ditto who’s following each blog (you can’t even really see all your own followers), and you don’t know who’s following anyone else either. Tumblr Analytics does exist, but not for ordinary users — instead you have to pay Tumblr partner Union Metrics $499 per month and what you get appears to be top-level and aggregate.
This leaves Tumblr a kind of “here be dragons” among social networks, which is unusual in an age so obsessed with them. That is, its social norms are not known; there isn’t any data about how its users behave and use the network (even for most Union Metrics subscribers there are no benchmarks). Rumours spread — Tumblr’s young, it’s photo-y and meme-driven, it’s full of weird tightly-interknit subcultures who reblog each other endlessly — but there is no data to support this, no way of discerning fact from — at best — intuition about one’s little own corner of the thing.