10^6 Giraffes | Hacker News Reader

10^6 Giraffes

onemilliongiraffes.com

82 pointsChrisRicca35 comments

...and I discover this just as I was about to launch my new startup: fivehundredthousandgiraffes.com

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

There's a cartoon somewhere of the 59 minute photo lab

like the 7 minute abs got usurped by the 6 minute abs?

My business model consists of convincing users that their giraffes are private and then, once I've got half a million, shamelessly changing my privacy policy to help advertisers.

I'm reminded of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army

"My friend, Zhang, doesn't believe I can collect one million soldiers by 209 BC. I'm gonna prove him wrong, but I need your help. (Or you'll be beheaded.) Thanks, Qin."

Our time is gentler -- the Age of the Giraffes.

Exercise for the interested reader - why could he not have said:

  > ... I can collect one million soldiers by 209 BC.

What, you mean a Chinese emperor did not know the exact future date of the birth of Christ?

Because he wasn't fluent in English?

Don't you have a lot of giraffes you should be riding right now?

Because 209 BC will in the past by the time he collects the soldiers... that is, the year after 209 BC is 208 BC.

Wikipedia puts the total African giraffe population at 110,000-150,000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe. So there are more pictures of giraffes than actual giraffes.

same applies on counting human photos on social site altogether (flickr, facebook, tweetpic, etc.) would be far more than 6,819,100,000 (population of the world - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population <- Anyone know the reason for the UN's low and medium estimates having serious downturns in population in the next century? Is it because of lowering child-birth rates, or because of expectations of resources/diseases, etc...?

According to the PDF: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wor... it's virtually all due to changes in fertility.

As countries grow in wealth and life expectancy, the number of children per woman tends to drop off drastically.

It's due to zombie apocalypse. Duh.

Keep in mind that every picture on that site is hand-made. The instructions disallow photos of actual giraffes or images created on/by a computer.

How many drawings and human-shaped sculpture are there on those social sites? I doubt there's more than the 6.8 billion you quote from wikipedia.

There are times when I realize what all of humanity has been building towards.

Having built machines that could compute billions of cycles per second and then having connected them with networks signaling each other across the planet at fearsome rates, I have wondered what the next step for our people would be.

Now I know. Now we might all gaze upon representations of giraffes and if we are worthy, we might contribute our own representation in a symbolic joining with the whole of the great human project.

http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/stats

I was somewhat amazed by those stats: I thought Americans would have contributed the most. Is there something I should know about Germans and Giraffes that I do not know?

It looks like this started in Europe. A mainstream American website usually sees a 1:2 domestic to international ratio while a niche/startup website usually starts out with the opposite (actually more like 10:1 I would guess.) This follows that pattern except the U.S. is part of the international piece of the pie.

There is this one submitter of Giraffes[1], responsible for two percent of all German giraffes, or this one[2], responsible for nearly five percent. I didn’t even have to look all that hard to find them.

[1] http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/search?name=Sanne

[2] http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/search?name=Ediktonia

[1] "I found 4 085 giraffes created by people named Sanne!"

[2] "I found 9 988 giraffes created by people named Ediktonia!"

The actual statistic is that 2% of all Germans who submitted giraffes were named Sanne and 5% were named Ediktonia. It doesn't say they were all the same person.

Sanne has actually only submitted 15 pictures. This is one of them, http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/?id=54374 There are ~2000 giraffes on one page. Ediktonia has similar images.

Personally, I think these works are kind of taking the piss.

Click through the giraffes. They are in fact all by the same person (or by different people who are all the same age and live in the same place).

Since The Sheep Market http://www.thesheepmarket.com/ paid people on Mechanical Turk 2c each for their sheep drawings I guess this means he's got nearly $16,000 of free labour so far.

I can't wait for RiderOfGiraffes to get wind of this project ... http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RiderOfGiraffes

<grin>

Nothing to do with me, but I watch with interest. Sadly I can't send a photo of my giraffes because she's store-bought.

Sorry - typo and it's too late to correct it.

s/giraffes/giraffe/

Singular. I only own one, although I have ridden several.

That's quite the giraffe gaffe.

I didn't even know giraffe riding existed. I always figured your username was some inside joke.

It's not an inside joke, and it is "real" for some definition of "real". I leave you to ponder the question. Email me if desperate.

I should have a photo somewhere ...

Get artistic and draw a picture of your giraffe!

I love it!

And I love the guessing game with the age of the submitter, I only wish the server wasn't getting slammed 'cause it takes too long to get the response.

So far I'm 6 votes in with 3.7 years avg difference so far, it's a pretty great idea, though I wonder if it selects based on users so you don't get shown consecutive (or even in the vicinity in the case of the mass posters another comment mentioned) giraffes from the same artist.

I remember sending a giraffe a long time ago, I had forgotten about it :)

I found one more!

  I=
  H
  H
  H

/==\ T T

    I=
    H
    H
    H
  /==\
  T  T

You intended this? Sadly, it doesn't qualify, since it's made with a computer.

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