Friday Fun Links 2-8-13

True story: Yesterday I went to Weather.com to try to get an update on the snow situation for Boston, and after about 30 seconds I turned to my office-mate and said "You know, I feel like Weather.com has started employing 16 year old girls to write their forecasts"  She looked at me like I was crazy until she came over and took a look.  There WERE WEIRD CAPITALIZATION THINGS HAPPENING. Some random sentences were in bold. There were far, far too many exclamation points!!!!!  Anyway, I felt a little crazy, like maybe this was just how things were being done these days, until Gawker put up this article this morning.

Not only did other people notice that the weather.com website appeared to be six kinds of high, but they cataloged how bad it was.  In case you're curious, the current headline there is LIVE - LIFE THREATENING STORM CLOSES IN along with this chart:

So, um....ACTION!!!!  PURPLE ACTION!!!!

Accuweather.com on the other hand, totally blew my mind by informing me that the word "blizzard" actually refers to wind and visibility reduction more than falling snow.  Apparently you don't even need any snow fall, just blowing snow, to get the blizzard label.  31 years in New England and this is the first I'm hearing of this.  Way to hold out on me guys.

Alright, more things I didn't know with Buzzfeed's 19 maps that put the US in perspective.  Madagascar really kind of surprised me here.  3 movies later, and I still had no idea it would stretch from Georgia to Canada.

An interesting incident over at Retraction Watch....last year they wrote 10 blog posts about a disgraced researcher and his retractions.  This week they received a take down notice from Wordpress, as apparently a site in India (which was not active when 9 out of the 10 articles were written) had copied the articles and then filed a DMCA takedown notice against the actual authors claiming plagiarism.  The plot is thickened by the fact that they were all about the same researcher, and that this researcher has recently hired someone to help clean up his online reputation.  More here. 

Have Lego prices gone up?  Down?  All around?  Here's the deal.

After my post earlier this week about living in Baltimore vs Boston, you might be interested in seeing a heat map of rent in Boston and DC.

That's it for now, stay warm and dry east coasters!