It’s Pi day on Saturday 3/14/15. Thanks to Quartz for pointing that out and pointing us to the fact that MIT will be using that auspicious date to tell students whether they have been accepted or not. And they are doing that starting at 9:26 am.
Pi = 3.141592653 etc. That's so geeky you gotta love it.
For geeks of another stripe, St. Patrick’s day is coming up too. A good time to try some of Vancouver’s newest craft breweries. If you are a conservationist, though, keep in mind that it can take as much as 20 litres of water to make one litre of beer though local brewers likely use only about seven litres of water per litre of beer. The City of Vancouver wants to curtail that.
While you are out having that beer or two, you will likely tweet. But beware of what you tweet. In a New York Times Magazine story Jon Ronson interviews a number of people who lost their jobs because of tweets they made, or in one case, were quoted in. It’s not the tweets themselves that are the tweeter’s downfall, but how they take on a life of their own, with people creating hashtags criticizing the tweeter and calling for repercussions and firings. Ronson calls it the public shaming of today.
A comment by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the niqab (which has been in the news lately) has caused a twitter flurry and its own hashtag “dresscodePM”.
It’s easy to make fun of or criticize someone you don’t know with a tweet. But Jimmy Kimmel Live is hitting back. By having celebrities read aloud mean tweets about themselves, and giving the twitter address of the tweeter, the public shaming is turned on to the tweeters. After all, who wants to be told, on public television by someone they’ve made fun of, that LOL and HaHa are redundant? That’s the comment U.S. president Barack Obama made while reading his own mean tweets.
And speaking of Twitter, it's launching a Hong Kong office in an attempt to attract Chinese firms, even though it is still blocked in China
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