that headline though ?, online journalism at its worst, the chase for clicks, there really needs to be some solution to this problem journalism is dying and clickbait is where is at.
And 'alien megastructures' isn't even the most ridiculous idea: https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_mont...
Incredibly implausible idea for the sheer improbability, but fun to imagine nevertheless.
Going from e.g. Earth to Mars does not consist of aiming for Mars and firing your rockets. It consists of hitting a parabolic transfer orbit and then doing another burn to place yourself in Mars' orbit -- or just heading right in if you've got the heat shields and retropropulsion for that. Basically you do orbital mechanics like Wayne Gretzky: you don't go to where the planet is, but where it's going to be.
Would interstellar flight be that different? Wouldn't you be executing a "transfer orbit" about the galactic center? Or is the effect of galactic-scale gravitational pull negligible there and you just end up basically going straight from A to B?
Edit: turns out this came from an actual subreddit dedicated to this star!
https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/
Subscribed!
Similar how transfer from earth to mars works via a solar orbit.
So, yes, you have to include orbital mechanics, not just straight lines.
At 2 light years for instance, that spacecraft would trace an apparent ellipse 3.3" in diameter, while Tabby's star (1,480 ly) would be stationary (0.004" parallax). In comparison, the star's apparent disk is just 30 μas wide (0.00003").
Imagine the 60s-90s and advertising just overwhelm with sexualised figures. We don't notice, because we just silently pass by.
I don't see any way of turning back the tide of hyperbolic titles on articles. Better to just ignore them and move on.
Buzzfeed headlines worked on me the first few times, now I know not to go there.
Perhaps one mathematical solution to the problem is to score pages based on the average time spent for each article. My hypothesis is that clickbait articles will score very low because the article will attract a lot of clicks from people who are not interested in the actual content but only the headline.
In theory, you could do this by deploying a tracker across the web similar to a Google analytics that performs the measurement. But in practice, of course, this isn't possible.
You might be able to approximate the score by building a browser extension that makes the measurement. A browser extension might also a good way to output results. It could, for instance, colour-code links (on mouseover) to help you spot click-bait before you click it!
We just need something like that for the web.
There are several libraries that extract article text reasonably well. I believe browser extensions are written mainly in HTML/JS/CSS. Would the following node library suffice? https://github.com/ageitgey/node-unfluff
There's just the question of retrieval speed. I suspect simple HTML retrieval is an order of magnitude faster than normal page rendering due to ads, javascript, etc. So the client-only solution you've proposed might indeed be sufficient!