Interesting Links for 01-12-2014

• Stunning resin art. Seriously, I thought this was real.
  (tags: art reality fish )
• How speakers make sound
  (tags: physics speakers sound )
• What do all the controls in an aeroplane cockpit do? (a _very_ detailed explanation)
  (tags: airplanes control design flight )
• English devolution: More than 100 councils demand more powers
  (tags: devolution politics uk )
• A round-up of the latest research in food/diet (spoiler: eating saturated fat not actually bad for you.)
  (tags: fat health food )
• Why Does Your Nose Get Stuffy One Nostril at a Time?
  (tags: noses viaJennieRigg science )
• A gorgeous hand-illustrated Silmarillion
  (tags: Tolkien illustration art books )
• Solar latecomer France builds Europe's largest plant
  (tags: solarpower France energy )
• 82% of people think local areas should have more power over education, policing, etc.
  (tags: devolution uk )
• Brain regions that encode words, grammar, story identified
  (tags: brains language )
• Facts from the 2014 UK Editions of Harry Potter
  (tags: harrypotter facts )
• Kazakh Couple Opens Country's First (And Classiest) Porn Theater
  (tags: porn kazakhstan sex epicwtf )

I went viral, and now I feel kinda weird about it

Yesterday, over at andrewducker, I reposted this image:


I snipped off the text it came with, because it was just a link back to the original Tumblr it came from - and you get that automatically as part of the Tumblr metadata.

About half an hour later the image was automatically reposted over to the AndyDuckersLinks FB page and andrewducker.

And a couple of people on Twitter liked it enough to retweet it, which was nice. And a couple of their friends liked it enough to retweet it again, and it was pretty awesome that it was making it's way around 100 people.

Two hours later, I thought it was pretty damned amazing that it had made it's way to 1,000 people. I've had tweets make it to more people than that before, but only if someone big retweeted it. This was the first time it had happened purely virally*.

Twenty three hours later - it's sitting at 14,573 retweets, and 15,949 favorites. Which just feels _weird_. The Poke has picked it up and labelled it as their Piechart of the year. And I can't actually see any replies or retweets of my actual friends on my notifications timeline, because I'm getting multiple notifications per minute of this tweet being retweeted, or other modified tweets of it being tweeted/liked.

And I feel a bit guilty because I can't trace back the original image - Google image search isn't really helping, sadly. And all I did was share an image that amused me, from a Tumblr that didn't provide any linking information.

I think the best thing to do here is...not to think about it much and go see Mockingjay with my wife. And then go to the Christmas Market and buy delicious German food. Mmm, bratkartoffeln.

*Cue people arguing in the comments about the definition of "viral".

Where the pyramid came from, how to make your own, and what I thought of Mockingjay.

Over on DW, miss_s_b linked to The Independent's posting of the pie chart GIF. And they pointed to the actual original source. Which is awesome, if a little late for the 15,000 people that already retweeted my copy of it. Still, at least now I can point a couple of you at it :->

Meanwhile, MartinBurnsSV points to this awesome animated javascript version.

And the retweeting seems to have slowed to a crawl, so my Twitter notifications feed is returning to normal, which is nice.

Oh, and Mockingjay Part I was awesome. I haven't read the books, but this was two hours of great character stuff with intermittent explosions - why on earth would you want to compress that to be able to squish the rest of the plot in? It didn't feel too long, and it never lagged. Marvellous stuff, and I'm really looking forward to part II in a year!

(I'd rather have it in six months, but I assume they want to give it time to be released around the world, hit the home theatre market and _then_ be released on Netflix in time to get people in for part 2. And avoid the summer blockbuster rush.)