We tweet! And have been doing it since 2008!

Baby Bird 08 by Jayme Frye via Flickr

Updates for all things earthpages.org and earthpages.ca at Twitter!

Also, I recently rediscovered a whole bunch of alternative and progressive news categories that I formerly used back in the ill-fated days of RSS. And today I added even more.

Every morning the best stories around the web are hand-picked—sometimes in the evening too. So check out our Twitter account. The feed at right only shows the latest 4 or 5 stories. There are TONS more!

• https://twitter.com/earthpages

—MC

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The complexities of actually getting people to Mars

No Man's Land: Where on Mars Should Astronauts Go? https://t.co/QHOBmlIAQ4 #science Looks at bacteria and other problems in getting to #Mars

— Earthpages.org (@earthpages) March 4, 2016

Editors note – sorry for messing up the heading with the wrong tweet in earlier post. It’s morning, I’m having my coffee and trying out an old computer with new USB wireless adapter (excuses but true!)

New, faster loading site!

https://t.co/DgRoND3fuF | https://t.co/DdDFkvZT3X has just been #optimized. So the sites should load faster! No more chat or ISS feeds🙂

— Earthpages.org (@earthpages) February 23, 2016

Open Call for developers, team members

Call for collaborators, developers, web gurus https://t.co/CvA5aBSUhV via @earthpages #future #development #earthpages

— Earthpages.org (@earthpages) February 15, 2016

Holiday update

Some children looking at a selection of Christmas Cards during the 1910 holiday season. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Happy Holidays everyone! I’d just like to highlight the most recent change in Earthpages’ Terms of Use. In a nutshell, I’ve enabled reblogging.

After testing out reblogging at earthpages.ca, it seems I’ve been way too cautious in not enabling it. The benefits are pretty clear to see – More traffic, more user interaction. Exactly what Earthpages is about!

A good example of what a reblog looks like can be seen here:

https://hocuspocus13.wordpress.com/2014/12/23/totem/

Generally, about two or three paragraphs are reproduced, with a link back to the entire article.

I truly hope that everyone who’s been published at Earthpages will be okay with this. If not, you can always get your articles removed. I’ll understand. But I still feel that the benefits of reblogging will far outweigh any potential issues.

Thanks,

Michael Clark, Christmas Day 2014

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for earthpages.org. Looks like the stats have risen considerably in 2012, which I’m very happy about. 2011 yielded about 78,000 hits while 2012 pulled in about 100,000. So that’s… hmmm… as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not that great at math. But if I had my calculator handy I could figure out the percentage increase.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 100,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Revisiting Durkheim

Black Panther à côté d’un Space Invader géant – Rue Emilie Durkheim: yoyolabellut / Lionel via Flickr

Here’s an essay I wrote as an enthusiastic (and pretty naive) undergraduate in the 1980s at Trent University: Emile Durkheim’s Theory of Egoistic Suicide.

I converted it to PDF in 2009. Since then I’ve picked up a better scanner, so I might try redoing it some day. But this copy is legible.

The essay was written on my very first computer, an Atari. It was one of the first PCs to hit the market, replete with an external floppy drive (those big, old floppies) and a modified wheel printer. A portable b&w TV from my parents’ kitchen served as my monitor.

I remember deciding to shell out $500 for that Atari and sort of tricking my professors because the printer looked like I’d typed the papers out when, in fact, I hadn’t. Hee hee. Most computers back then, you see, had early generation (lousy quality) dot matrix printers, and professors hated grading work printed on them. Some even refused to accept papers printed by dot matrix.

My Atari was a great investment because for the first time in my life, I could word process without having to use whiteout or cut and paste real paper. And I could also play space invaders at home!😉

The paper, itself, is an analytical assessment of Émile Durkheim‘s pioneering theory on suicide. My professor was excellent, and very British. So I guess I semi-consciously let loose the UK roots within my Canadian personality, hoping to connect. (Looking back, I can see that I wrote differently for my Canadian, American and European professors, already developing a flexible writing style.)

On the theoretical side, I remember being impressed at how Durkheim looked at European demographics to try to understand suicide as a social phenomenon, just as social psychologists, advertisers and researchers examine data today. But like any thinker, old or new, Durkheim had his limitations…

Feel free to mention this – and the ideas it contains – in university and college assignments. Be sure to use one of the standard online citation styles if you do.

» Emile Durkheim’s Theory of Egoistic Suicide

—MC

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• What Would Durkheim Say? Altruistic Suicide in Analyses of Suicide Terrorism (zuleykazevallos.com)
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