Vote
Early. Vote Often.
 I like Reddit. It does a great service bringing obscure and,
often, important issues to the forefront. I mean if you want
to stay current on Ron Paul, atheism, XKCD or the finest
babes on the net, then go to reddit.com
However, Reddit is fucked up.
The problem is the down-voting system as it allows users
to arbitrarily eliminate an otherwise good link, or to use
the
capability of down-voting as a tool of vengeance.
I'm particularly active on the Comics sub-reddit and it's
clear to me that if you wanted to favor a particular set
of comics you just simply down-vote all the others as they
appear, usually around midnight. As there is a flood
of
web-comics,
all competing for the same eyeballs, it's not hard not imagine
someone sock-puppeting multiple accounts to cripple the competition.
If, on the other hand, there's only an up-vote then there's
less opportunity for chicanery, except those who vote ironically
or as a
complete goof. Plus, all new links would now only be judged
relative to zero. So a total of 200 up-links is just
that,
200. Not 397 up and 197 down. This is undoubtably more honest
metric.
It's within the realm of possibility that the programmers
at Reddit have intentionally offered the down-vote as a tool
to appeal to the base instincts of its users. If so,
then they've done a good job of it.
-------
 Do
you know what thermite is? It's
a chemical
compound that burns at over 2500 degrees Celsius. Steel melts
at 1500 degrees Celsius. Jet fuel burns at about 800
degrees Celsius. Jet fuel cannot melt steel. Thermite can.
When they got to the bottom of the big pile of jumbled metal
that used to be the World Trade Center they found huge pools
of molten metal, exactly what you'd expect to find if you'd
used thermite on the vertical support beams of the structures.
They even found these pools of molten metal under Building
Seven, which wasn't struck by an airplane that day.
I bring this unfortunate subject up again because a recent
study by the Open Chemical Physics Journal has discovered
the remnants of super-thermite in the samples of material
collected from around the buildings after 9/11. You can
read more about
it here.
I'm one of those people who, after information began leaking
out about the events of 9/11, hasn't believed for a second
any part of the government's official story. For one thing,
if you understood how the Towers were constructed you'd understand
they could never have fallen the way they did. And for both
of them to collapse in the exact same fashion defies credulity.
-------
=mike=
|
