see the moon and the stars

In the wild, researchers have found that most wolf packs are simply families, led by a breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.

Pop up ads:

“It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content. Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”

And pop-up advertising was born. Zuckerman, who now works for the Centre for Civic Media at MIT, bemoans the current ad-supported state of the web. Believing that “advertising is the original sin of the web” and that “the fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2014/08/15/the-man-who-invented-pop-up-ads-says-im-sorry/

Labradoodles:

Mr. Conron, who has been credited with sparking a crossbreeding frenzy resulting in shih poos, puggles and more, said the labradoodle was originally intended as a guide dog, not a fashion accessory.

“I bred the labradoodle for a blind lady whose husband was allergic to dog hair,” Mr. Conron said, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Why people are breeding them today, I haven’t got a clue,” he added.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/us/labradoodle-creator-regret.html

Jaws:

“That’s one of the things I still fear—not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975,” Spielberg tells BBC Radio 4’s Lauren Laverne. “I truly, and to this day, regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film.”

Jaws spearheaded a “collective testosterone rush” among fishers in the East Coast of the United States, leading thousands to hunt sharks for sport, as George Burgess, former director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, told the BBC in 2015. In the years following the film’s release, the number of large sharks in the waters east of North America declined by about 50 percent.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/steven-spielberg-regrets-how-jaws-impacted-real-world-sharks-180981335/

Gender reveals:

It was maybe a year or so later that I started seeing people I didn’t know having parties kind of copying mine with gender reveal cakes. It was really weird to me. I kept thinking maybe someone did one before me but NPR did this whole exhaustive thing and got to the bottom of it.

When I first saw that a gender-reveal party had caused a forest fire I cried because I felt responsible. But here’s the thing – when planes crash no one goes after the Wright brothers. I think the parties probably would have happened anyway. I put form to it, but it’s not that crazy of an idea.

Now I think the whole thing is not great at all, though. The problem is they overemphasize one aspect of a person. I had two more kids after Bianca, but I never had another gender reveal party.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/29/jenna-karvunidis-i-started-gender-reveal-party-trend-regret

Shopping malls:

This radical vision was the work of Victor Gruen, a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. He set his sights on bringing a dose of Viennese urbanity to what he saw as the car-dominated “avenues of horror” of American commercial strips. He imagined Southdale as the centre of a new high-density, mixed-use district, surrounded by housing and offices, as well as a school and a medical centre, with an artificial lake wrapped by curved streets, all forming a utopian “blight-proof neighbourhood”.

Dayton, the development company, had other ideas. The construction of the shopping centre massively raised land values in the surrounding area, so they decided to cash in, flogging their remaining plots to builders of single-family homes. The result has since become an all-too-familiar sight across the US: a mall marooned in a sea of car parking, ringed by multi-lane roads and suburban sprawl. It was far from an inclusive vision, either. By proposing an idealised alternative to downtown – removed from actual downtown, shielded from the elements, only accessible by car and designed solely for shopping – Gruen had created a mechanism to protect white, middle-class homeowners from those unlike themselves.