“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” (Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon)

You don’t need to hear me rant on again about uncontrolled Google Ads.

Yesterday, I moved the homepage of the Haredi Women Professionals (aka Supermom) Network to a new hosting site that plants automatic Google ads along one side of the page. In the ten minutes between my setting up the page and paying for a premium service entitling me to remove the Google Ads, the homepage was advertising links to pornography (how obvious, given the word “Women” in the title, right?).

Here’s another example (from a search results page). Not a mis-match of interests, this time, as much as poorly-chosen ad copy:

Need I point out that Orthodox Jewish Women are not for sale?! :.D

…for example, if you’re working with text originally written by a non-native speaker of the language.

I wanted to change the setting on a very simple (kosher) Samsung flip phone, so that instead of answering calls automatically when I open the phone, it will only answer when I press the “call” button to accept the call (this gives me a chance to see Caller ID first).

I knew the setting was available somewhere. Well, I looked and I looked. I hunted through every possible menu (there aren’t many on this phone).

In desperation, I got help from an Israeli colleague, who found the setting in just a couple of minutes. It wasn’t obvious. The function can be found in the “Extra Settings” in the “Settings” menu — fair enough. But the function itself is called “Active Folder”.

As a native English-speaker, I understood “Active Folder” to mean “a group of files or functionalities that are activated”, and therefore didn’t select that function even when I saw it during my original hunt.

My English-as-a-second-language colleague understood “Active Folder” correctly: “the function triggered by folding the phone is active”.

From a consistently fascinating blog, Arthur Shapiro’s Illusion Sciences. Illusion Sciences isn’t in the class of trick pictures you looked at in a 6th-grade science unit; it explores what makes the mind interpret (and mis-interpret) images. Take a look at the site. You’ll be surprised.

Click on the image to go to the Illusion Sciences site, where the image is active:

Some people are in a race to “keep up with the Joneses”. Some people are in a race to “keep down with the Cohens“. As for hats…

[today’s offering from xkcd]

“Poised between the Scylla and the Charybdis”: Why anyone would choose to be poised there, I don’t know. But it must provide a gratifying feeling of importance to be able to express your lose-lose situation so dramatically.

Remember those warm, fuzzy “Reach Out and Touch Someone” ads on TV? They were sappy, soppy spots that made pregnant women weep, as distant relatives (usually gray-haired grannies) heard the voices of those they loved. Anticipating Skype video conferencing (if only they had known…), the ads used image-in-image to double the poignancy.

Those were the days when communication was about… well, interacting with other people. As opposed to, say, yourself.

Try these on for size:

• Create the illusion of communication. You maxed out your emergency credit card the first week of school. Your parents are looking for some answers. A text message isn’t going to cut it but a voicemail would mean that you tried calling them.

• Just tell your side of the story. You just partied hard last night and going to work is just not on your radar today. You dread having to call your boss and answering any awkward questions he may have. Instead just leave him a simple voicemail letting him know that you won’t be coming into work today.

• Have your cake and eat it too. You desperately need to call your girlfriend but she is a talker and you don’t want to spend an hour on the phone with her because you would much rather watch the game with your buddies. Leave her a sweet voicemail and get a reprieve for the night.

• Play the field more effectively. You are dating quite a few people at the same time. You don’t want to leave them all text messages because there is nothing romantic about that. But a nice voicemail to each would score you points.

Are you sick, yet? These are real examples of how Slydial can be helpful to you! (If you can stomach it, there are more here.)

Given that people are listening less and less to their voicemail messages, I wonder how “off the hook” you really are with Slydial. But if I needed any validation that messaging today is about Me Me Me, now I’ve got it.
[Thanks to the Bell System Memorial site for bringing back those touching memories of long-distance service.]

Serbin founded Duo Guo in Shanghai after observing the huge demand, if not pent-up desire, of people to buy content for their mobiles right inside the store.

Many customers who had just spent close to a month’s salary for a new mobile phone were then rearing to load it up with value-added content such as software, games and other multimedia entertainment.

But in most cases, they just didn’t know how.

[via CNN]

A gem of a site, dedicated to preserving the memories of Jewish-owned family grocery stores in the greater Washington, DC area. (Is that a specific niche, or what?!) Don’t miss it.

Lacking radar detectors Iranian drivers have come up with a more communal, cooperative system of detecting cops. As we would approach a speed trap or hidden checkpoint oncoming drivers would flash their lights and then make an odd twirling motion with their fingers as the cars neared. Judging by how anxiously or quickly they spun their fingers you got an idea of how close the fuzz was, an action I observed in every section of the country I visited. This ‘us against the police’ mindset offers a more revealing insight into how people feel about the authorities than a stack of newspapers or months of research.

[From the oddly-inspired Axis of Evil World Tour]