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Alternatively a few years later at my 96 school science fair, a kid made a website with Microsoft Frontpage and won first prize. The website was like, “Ryan’s Website”. I was so pissed. Like what part of the scientific method was applied to that project?
We had a kid win the science fair because he wrote 2 paragraphs about the new solar panels that the school added. People had sculptures that must’ve taken weeks and he swept with a poster board. He truly was ready for academia.
Hypothesis: Judges are idiots impressed by shiny trinkets.
Methodology: literally just the source html from some random website, but edited witb my name.
Replace judges with people. This effect can be seen everywhere. Especially within professionals lacking Knowledge in some topic (but of course taking Part in discussions)
Results: Coming in shortly.
My school had a kid build a computer for the science fair, and our science teacher was like “yeah, you basically just put together an expensive lego set.” and gave him an “adequate” ribbon
Are they wrong though? Unless the kid literally assembled his own PCBs, computers aren’t that difficult.
In those days, PCs came with a crate of snall black connectors called jumpers, that you had to place in specific ways to arrange your IRQs and more.
Mainboard and BIOS settings were also not always configured with sane defaults, so it could be quite the puzzle.
God, I would’ve loved an adequate ribbon.
I hope your day was more than adequate 🙂
🥹 best day ever
In 2003 when I was in high we took a field trip to the international science and engineering fair. This is like the top level of the science fair only the “best” projects should be there. The only project I remember from that trip 21 years ago was the kid with the water cooled PC. At the time it was hot shit and I’m sure had some jank in it.
I pulled this same thing in college. I was a CS major in the late 90’s and I took a class from the writing department on changing discourse in a new digital era.
The professor was really good at literary analysis and knew next to nothing about computers. He was spot on that big changes were afoot but he was as wrong as anyone else on what those changes were (spoiler: we all thought we would have an alternate universe in Cyberspace TM).
We had the option of creating a website as our final project and we realized that if we just put in every possible feature we’d get an A. Animated backgrounds? Moving fonts? Music? A goofy mouse pointer? No feature was too dumb. If it was something you couldn’t do on a piece of paper, we added it to our website.
We got our A. It was a dirty A but we took it.
<blink>gimme an A</blink>
Science fairs have always had this “World’s Fair” like undercurrent. You’re supposed to do actual science and be judged for that. But you can usually get very far with a clickbait-worthy hypothesis like “is it possible to…” or “what is the outcome of…” and ride on pure novelty and wow-factor. I’ve done both at the same time: eye-popping visuals with a provocative hypothesis, but with real R&D to back it up.
That’s why I did “watching paint dry” as an actual science fair experiment. Tried putting paint in different environments to see how conditions actually effected the speed in which it dried.
Requires experimentation to backup a hypothesis with empirical data. Yeah it sounds boring, but had some fun with it regarding the different “environments” (like under heat lamp, with a fan, etc.)
I applaud your adherence to the scientific method. Amusingly, this is probably a lot closer to how science is conducted out in the professional world.
Yeah, not everything in science is super cool, but it is valuable to show why testing things out matters. Although it’s not like the scientific community has been great about doing peer reviews anyways.
"For my science project I have chosen to peer review Jacob’s paper on the smelliness of the boys restroom.
My review could find no hypothesis nor data collection in the original from which he concluded the different ways the vaguely described room smelled.
It is my conclusion that his passing grade was based on (1)having delivered some content on or before the deadline, (2) presenting various physical attributes under an accurately defined heading, and (3) minimum spelling mistakes.
I have illustrated these and other aspects by representing his paper with the teacher’s markups.
I will be taking no questions at this time."
Oooh, savagely destroying bad projects from last year? Why didn’t I think of this?!
Rigor is the bedrock of science.
We did a geocities website for our English assignment on “a tale of two cities” and got an A on it. I remember us using yahoo chat to work on it together. We were ahead of our time.
Pretty ironic choice in a topic on unfair judges.
Hah, I did that for a 6th grade English project where we had to do a tutorial on something. So I chose “how to make a website” and whipped up a quick page in Notepad.
Little did I know that the school computers were so locked down that I couldn’t even open a local file in IE (the only browser we were allowed to use). They completely disabled the open and save dialogs and even Ctrl+O. Which was embarrassing as fuck cause it was a live demonstration and 12-year-old me didn’t think to test it beforehand.
Still got an A, though. Most other kids did dumb things like “how to tie a shoe”.
To be honest, I wouldn’t have been much impressed by the HTML specifications, either. An open source alternative for gopher? Oh, how cute. Be sure to tell all your geek friends.
Gopher wasn’t open source? There were linux clients.
In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[11][9] Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations.[12][13] Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership.[14] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Decline
It’s probably not quite right to call it an open source alternative, though. I don’t think that gopher or anything was established in a monopolistic way, but that was before my time. Besides, the internet was all universities back then.
It’s true that Gopher never really went anywhere. It was convenient for what it was and it had Veronica (a basic search engine) which made it useful. But hyperlinks were a killer feature.
But hyperlinks were a killer feature.
Berners-Lee didn’t come up with that idea, though, did he? I thought he got the idea from Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu.
Gopher itself is spec’d out in RFC-1436. It’s not a particularly difficult protocol to implement. It’s easier than HTTP/1.1 (though not necessarily pre-1.0 versions; those are basic in an under-designed way, and I’d say the same about Gopher). I don’t know if that licensing fee claim holds up. People may have been worried about it at the time, but UMN never had a patent on it or anything, and RFC’s are public. If there were fees charged, it’d be the creators themselves charging them.
but look at the internet now. maybe they had a point.
That’s normal. The printing press spread scientific knowledge and informed people with newspapers. It also gave us ad riddled glossy magazines and political pamphlets. Same for radio and TV.
Meh. The guy wanted to integrate micropayments in HTML as soon as it took off. Would you like that better?
It was a distributed way to fund media instead of banner ads. I think it would have been a tough sell, but imagine if all the 30% stakes that PayPal, Apple, Patreon, take were direct to creators?
This of course would all depend on a reliable search engine that could actually find things worth supporting.
Instead we had Geocities and Live Journal jamming ads all over to make it a “free” service, until it wasn’t. Now we have Google, TikTok and Facebook to replace them but that could turn it all off whenever they want.
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maybe? it’s impossible to predict what effects that would have resulted in but what we ended up with now isn’t exactly great.
your options now are either full subscription only, with little audience and a huge barrier to get users as you have tonconvince them it’s worth a full size payment.
or convince someone else to pay you, e.g referral links and sponsored posts. this leads to low quality ‘reviews’ where the best affiliate program wins.
or put advertisers content in your site…and deal with people blocking it, and all the seo spam to get viewers onto those ads…
or…monetize your service by harvesting data on your users to then sell to whoever is willing to pay you for that data…also not good.
maybe if we figured out micropayments early we could have avoided some of that. or maybe we’d just have all of that on top of micropayments. or something even worse to maximize micropayments.
We should have all switched to VRML, uphill both ways.
He should have posted it to r*ddit and started a kickstarter to hype it up.
Wait
Hold on
5000 dollarydoos and you get first dibs on domain names 10000 dollarydoos and you can choose a top level domain
reviewer’s comments probably:
I don’t see much application potential for this and the claims that this could be used world-wide are not convincing
In 6th grade for a public speaking assignment I gave a presentation on the world wide web and described how we could eventually use it for checking your bank account or ordering a pizza. My teacher said we’d never get there.
Hope you’re still waiting on hold for that pepperoni Mrs. Z!
In college in 1982 the professor wrote “blips” on the chalkboard abd said in the future all money would be blips in a computer, and we all laughed and said that’s ridiculous, computers will never be reliable enough to trust with that.
They still aren’t reliable enough
That’s wild!
Also, what’s bluesky? Any good? Worth signing up just to see it??
It’s like Twitter, but self-righteous rather than filled with Nazi screed. Still run by the old Twitter founder tho. So…
🤷♂️
To each their own.
Blue Sky: What Twitter wanted to be.
Mastodon: What Twitter was suppose to be.
Threads: Zuckerberg is watching you post cats.
In May, Dorsey said he was no longer with BlueSky.
Yeah he’s preaching Nostr now.
Nostr? As in adamus?
Cosa Nostra.
Nostr, another federated social media protocol, kind of like ActivityPub (which we’re using right now), but different.
You know how Apple has their own charger, their own messaging app, and some other stuff just so that they are different? Because fuck the rest of us, I guess? That’s bluesky, relative to fedi space.
Future garbage. Just like most tech bro social.
It’s a python library for controlling experimental hardware and managing experiment data and metadata at large scale research facilities such as synchrotrons, free-electron lasers, and neutron sources. It’s pretty great, but there’s no need to sign up to anything.
I’m on bluesky. It got most of the twitter people I followed for humor. The protocol supposedly allows (will allow?) other servers, but for now I think it’s mostly the one. I prefer mastodon governance/structure, but bluesky has a bunch of people I want to read.
