The election, Web 1.0 and some math jokes

There's an election going on where I live.  Debates, particularly among political leaders are generally a feature of an election campaign and this one is no different.  Today, PC leader Hugh McFadyen, NDP leader Greg Selinger and Liberal leader Jon Gerrard gathered around some mics and got in as many words as they could about crime and health care.  I got to sit in the next room over and and live-tweet along with what was being said.

It was kinda neat.  I've attended/listened to/watched many of these things, managed the occasional question and have talked about them in the past amongst my peers.  But this is the first time I offered running commentary on one to people who weren't in the same room as I.

Twitter was responsible for spreading my message far and wide, to everyone that happened to subscribe to CJOB's twitter feed.  I was handed the keys and told to go for it.  I hope some subscribers took something away from it, I equally hope nobody unsubbed because of it.

This is really the Internet at its best, the near instant exchange of information.  You may not be familiar with that particular application of the Internet as it doesn't get much use for that.    Far more bandwidth is devoted to the scholarly pursuits of listening to theme songs from tv shows of the 80s on YouTube and looking at pictures of cats with purposefully misspelled captions.

But before before the blogosphere there was the information super highway.  This was the world of Web 1.0.  There were no blogs, only web pages.  Real Player tried to bring us audio and video, but it never finished buffering.  Before whatever social media is today and what it will be in the next couple of years, Usenet and IRC reigned supreme.  Both are still around, but are shadows of their former selves.  And who can forget accessing information with the Lynx browser using the once proud gopher protocol?

Really, except for Real Player not being very good and nobody using gopher and Lynx anymore, the Internet hasn't changed.  Web 2.0 just makes things nicer looking and easier to get at.  You could always do what blogging is on a personal web page and people would use IRC to communicate in real-time, more or less like Twitter except it was harder to see what happened before you logged in and your audience was limited only to the people in the room.

I'm just guessing here, but I think that's where hashtagging comes from.  To talk over IRC a person had to join a room, and rooms were differentiated from users by having a hashtag in front of the name of the room.  Rooms tended to be divided by topic, so if you were in the #winnipeg room, you were talking about Winnipeg.  Seems like the same idea to me. 

Anyway, in honour of my walk down Web 1.0 memory lane and for the benefit of some people I know taking an editing class that will soon be focusing on numbers, here are some humorous highlights from bash.org's IRC quote archive. 

<kow`> "There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't."
<SpaceRain> That's only 2 types of people, kow.
<SpaceRain> STUPID

<tadpoleofdeath> Why do so many math majors confuse Halloween and Christmas?
<elfking> why?
<tadpoleofdeath> Because Oct 31 is Dec 25

<IncoherentMoron> choose an integer between 1 and 35
<Elliotw2> F
<IncoherentMoron> base 10, smartass

And something a touch more modern, a photo(!) with one more number joke:

Imaginary numbers, eh?  Could those be infecting the "Crocus calculator" that McFadyen insists Selinger uses?