Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2017

[Medieval] Castles – Functions & Characteristics (1000-1300)

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 30 Sep 2016

» SOURCES & LINKS «

France, John: Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades 1000-1300#

Ohler, Norbert: Krieg & Frieden im Mittelalter

Contamine, Philippe: War in the Middle Ages

Pounds, Norman J. G. Pounds: Medieval Castle in England & Wales: A Political and Social History

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/early_english_currency.htm

http://www.ancientfortresses.org/medieval-occupations.htm

https://www.britannica.com/technology/castle-architecture#ref257454

http://www.castrabritannica.co.uk/texts/text04.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlech_Castle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerage_of_England

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Castle

“Nice little business you’ve got here, Mr. Forbes. It’d be a shame if something happened to its Google search results…”

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Gizmodo, Kashmir Hill recounts the tale of what happens when Google decides to suppress media coverage it doesn’t like:

Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished.

I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job. In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then-new social network, Plus.

The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1″ social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results — a crucial source of traffic to publishers.

This sounded like a news story to me. Google’s dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network.

I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes.

After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google.

With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting.

    The Google guys explained how the new recommendation system will be a factor in search. “Universally, or just among Google Plus friends?” I asked. ‘Universal’ was the answer. “So if Forbes doesn’t put +1 buttons on its pages, it will suffer in search rankings?” I asked. Google guy says he wouldn’t phrase it that way, but basically yes.

(An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.)

This article reminded me that I was still showing a “Google+” share button on my postings … it’s still available for all three of you that still use that service, but it’s now in the “More” group instead.

Making zero clearance table saw inserts

Filed under: Technology, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 13 May 2012

Showing the steps for making a zero clearance table saw insert
http://woodgears.ca/delta_saw/insert.html

QotD: All aboot that Canajan accent, eh?

Filed under: Cancon, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was also delighted to learn that “rhotacized speech — that is, speech in which the “R” sound is somehow disfigured — tends to be amusing for English speakers.” As an English speaker with a rhotic, Canadian accent, I delight in my English wife’s non-rhotic pronunciations of “hair” (“hehhh”) and “there” (“thehhh”), and often find myself parroting her when she says them to the point where selectively rhoticizing and de-rhoticizing our speech has become a running gag in our family.

Cory Doctorow, “The true story behind the ERMAHGERD meme just makes us love it more”, BoingBoing, 2015-10-16.

Powered by WordPress