Enlarge / Christopher Poole, founder of 4chan, speaks during the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York on Tuesday, May 25, 2010. (credit: Getty Images / Ramin Talaie)

CNBC reports that 4chan founder Chris Poole no longer works at Google. Google hired Poole in 2016 to work on the company's doomed social media project, Google+. Poole lasted just five years at Google, which CNBC notes is usually just long enough for any employee's shares attached to hiring to vest. It sounds like Poole never found a solid landing spot at Google, as he had three different positions during his five years.

Poole's 4chan is an anonymous, ephemeral imageboard that is often given the title "cesspool of the Internet." The site is broken up into boards of various topics, and some of the more lawless boards are home to all of the worst characters on the Internet, like school shooters, child pornographers, and racists. It's also the birthplace of a lot of Internet culture, like Rickrolling, lolcats, and, more recently, Pepe the frog memes and the alt-right. The site gave rise to the Internet hacktivist group Anonymous and is often used as a dumping ground for various hacks like the Nintendo Gigaleak. Poole sold 4chan back in 2015, a year before joining Google.

Back when Poole was hired, Google's fear of Facebook gave it an unhinged obsession with social media, but nobody at Google really understood how social media worked. Poole's hiring at the company was controversial, but high-ranking Google+ execs defended the move. 4chan is a social site with millions of monthly visitors, and that made Poole one of the company's few experienced social experts when he arrived.

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flickr user: Andrew Huff

Nintendo fans, mark your calendars for May 20, 2014. As Nintendo announced yesterday, that's the last day you'll be able to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to play hundreds of online games on the Wii and Nintendo DS. Single-player modes for those games will still work, of course, but any parts of the games that require an Internet connection will be completely non-functional in a matter of months.

The shutdown will affect some of both systems' most popular games, some of the best-selling games of all time. Suddenly, over 34 million copies of Mario Kart Wii and 23 million copies of Mario Kart DS will be severely diminished. The tens of millions of people who own the DS Pokemon games will no longer be able to trade their beasts or battle online. Animal Crossing: Wild World and Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be less functional for over 11 million players each.

Sure, as a practical matter, relatively few of these tens of millions of players are still making regular use of online servers for games that are sometimes pushing nine years old. If they were, Nintendo would probably have more interest in continuing to maintain those servers on the theory that it would lead to some more very-long-tail sales for its online-enabled games. On the other hand, Nintendo could be more interested in trying to force more players off its "legacy systems" and on to the Wii U and 3DS, which of course still have active online support.

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Journalists have recently fallen in love with the word spike used as a verb. This is about data analysis, not touchdown celebrations, beach volleyball, or a story being rejected by an editor. We now read that search warrants from the FISA court have spiked, peanut allergy diagnoses have spiked, the use of filibusters has spiked.

It’s interesting that this kind of chart-based terminology has made it into popular culture. It’s an indication that graphs, especially time-series graphs, have so insinuated themselves into our lives that reporters feel comfortable using what used to be a specialist’s term in articles for a general audience. Too bad they almost always use it wrong.

In a time-series chart, a spike is a brief period in which whatever is being tracked is much higher than usual. Your heart rate spikes during a life-threatening emergency, for example. If you have a water hammer problem in your plumbing, it’s because the pressure in the pipes spikes when you close a faucet. When graphed, a spike in the data looks like this:

Spike is a great word—short, punchy, and highly descriptive. Looking at the graph, it’s obvious where it comes from. It is interesting that sudden, brief downward drops aren’t called spikes—they look just as spiky and spikes are often pointed down. I guess it’s because we tend to think of the space below a line chart as solid and the space above as air. The terms peak and valley are other examples of this topographic interpretation.

Anyway, two things are necessary to make a spike: the jump in values must be significant and it must be of short duration. The first is, of course, a matter of interpretation. Is a 10% increase a spike? It could be if the usual variation is quite small, but whenever I read that something “spiked 10%,” I assume the reporter is being hyperbolic to make the story sound more important.

You could say that the brevity of a spike is also a matter of interpretation, but there’s one thing that’s indisputable: a rise in value isn’t a spike if it never comes back down. This is why the examples in the first paragraph aren’t spikes. FISA warrants are still high, as are peanut allergy diagnoses and Senate filibusters.

In mathematical terms, these things that reporters say are spiking are less like Dirac delta functions and more like Heaviside step functions. They aren’t spiking, they’re jumping.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain. If reporters weren’t saying these things are spiking, they’d probably be saying they’re at an inflection point, and the misuse of that term always causes my blood pressure to spike.

Often I write about technology or curiosities. Occasionally I write about comedy or politics. Rarely I write other things.

On those rare occasions, I press a publish button that hurts just a little. I put skin in the game. Sometimes I ask myself why. It hurts to write things down that matter. It hurts more to pull back the skin to reveal the tissue and sinew to the world. Why do I do it?

The world is not a clean place. It's made of dirt, puke and scars. We are all made of dirt, puke and scars. In some way, I'm trying to be a real human at the other end of a web browser. I'm not a URL or IP address. I exist beyond an avatar or Twitter handle. Behind every snarky article and questionable rumor there is a deeply flawed person pretending to be a writer or artist. There are charlatans among us.

My dents are small but they are mine. I've tried to leave the world in a slightly better condition than I found it, but I try to leave a mark. App reviews and keyboard shortcuts are fun, but what do I have to point to that I am proud of? I review a lot of PDF editors. That's not tombstone material.

Who am I? Who do you think I am? Well, I'm a collection of things that I put into the world. I am the things that I do over and over. As far as you know, I am this Web site. So this Web site has a tiny bit of me floating around. It has letters to my daughter and conversations with my father. It has mother's day cards and motorcycle accidents. It has love and hate and disappointment. It has cracks because the world is not an app review.