The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 72,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 3 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 16 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 44 posts. There were 12 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 8mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 21st with 942 views. The most popular post that day was Ron Mueck.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, facebook.com, twitter.com, search.aol.com, and dailybooth.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ron mueck, mueck, ron mueck sculptures, ron mueck’s sculptures, and hyper realism.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Ron Mueck March 2009
5 comments

G20 By jen takes pictures on Flickr © All Rights Reserved

An insane amount of security measures were taken to protect all the world leaders that were in Toronto for the summit, including thousands upon thousands of police officers and gigantic fences meant to protect the area surrounding the summit. Despite the mobs of police, a disgusting amount of vandalism took place, among the peaceful protesters.

Clearly, a small group of anarchists took the weekend as an excuse to cause trouble, which overshadowed any sort of peaceful & potentially productive protesting that could have taken place.

While the vandalism and violence that took place is absolutely disgusting and disgraceful, in my opinion, there was a lot of disgusting behaviour by the police, who had trapped crowds of violent protesters, peaceful protesters, viewers, photographers, media and unwitting passers-by.

My opinion is that many of those who were in these crowds were not attempting to cause violence or harm to anyone, but were merely pissed off that the police were given special authority during the G20 weekend, which effectively took away rights and freedoms of innocent civilians. Burning police cars to the ground and smashing the windows of storefronts is not an effective way of making one’s point about this issue, but I can understand where many of these people were coming from. The police were basically given the power to harass and interrogate anybody who was in particular areas at particular times. There was even an incident in which an officer told a young man that he was no longer in Canada.

Overall, I think everybody was drunk with power and a lot of unnecessary shit went down. Both sides went too far, and both sides over-reacted.

disproportionate force. By ronnie.yip on Flickr © All Rights Reserved.

Can’t we all just come to an agreement?

Click to Enlarge

Okay, since a chunk of you guys enjoyed my last post, I thought I’d post another interesting optical illusion I recently found. If you immediately see what really exists in this photo, then you probably won’t get it, but if you see something that’s not really there, it’ll be pretty shocking when you discover the truth.

Was that vague enough for you?

When I first saw this image, I saw it spinning counter-clockwise and was convinced that it was only possible to see it spinning in that direction, so I re-read the words explaining it and suddenly it was spinning in the other direction. My mind…was blown.

It took me a while to switch back again, but once I switched my perception a couple times, I figured out how the illusion works.

Is this girl facing towards you or away from you? Can you switch your perception so it’s either way? Your mind can make up the details that are lost in the silhouette so that you’re either seeing the front of her, or the back.

The same principle works with the animated ballerina image. Since the image has no details or depth (if it were a 3D model spinning, this illusion wouldn’t work) your mind can decide which direction it wants to see. The only difference is that you’re not switching from seeing her front front to her back, you’re switching whether you’re looking up at the girl, or looking down at her.

If this illusion is old news, I apologize, but this is the first time I’ve seen this, and my mind is still a little blown.

Still can’t get it?

Try focusing on something else on the page. Your mind mind flip your perception when you’re not focusing on the direction anymore.

The original post of the video was viewed over 700 000 times before YouTube removed it due to violation of terms of service. When the NSFW crew found out that Melissa, the girl featured in the video, didn’t want the video posted online in the first place, they felt responsible to somehow make it up to her.

Melissa graciously appeared on the NSFW show the following week, on which it was decided that everybody would try to either get Lady Gaga to make a comment on the video, or to have The Ellen Degeneres Show acknowledge it in some way.

If you want to help this poor girl out and try to help NSFW make things better, you can tweet @LadyGaga or @TheEllenShow about it to try to get one of these things to happen. Here’s more information about how to help:

http://www.makemelissasday.com/

As a secondary mission to “make melissa’s day”, there was a campaign to collectively raise enough money to buy Melissa an iPod touch. With a goal of $400, over $500 has already been raised.

If you’d like to participate in helping this girl out, please just send a couple tweets and something great might happen to this girl.