PUBLIC MARKS with search million-gallonsperday(mgd)

Even more likely, they were gawking at a very, very large scoreboard — the 160-foot-long, 1.2 million pound, Mitsubishi Diamond Vision true HD display, that is the centerpiece of Cowboys Stadium. This is a spectacular object, this scoreboard. It cost, by itself, twice as much to build as the previous Cowboys Stadium. It is maintained via a ten-level internal scaffolding system and its use requires the services of a full-time, highly trained operations team. Its display capacity is equal to 4,920 52-inch flat panel televisions, and it is illuminated by 30 million pulsing light bulbs. In short, it makes your typical Jumbotron look like a 13-inch TV/VCR.

We had planned for a lot of traffic on launch day and had been load testing the game - in fact, we've been testing and optimizing for a whole month. However, between the enthusiasm of Monopoly fans around the world, everyone who was excited to try out the new experience and non-stop mentions of the game on Twitter, blogs and everywhere else, our servers were overwhelmed. Based on the stats we have, we show a daily rate of about 1.7 million unique visitors, but the figure is likely far higher.

Tough economic times call for innovative approaches. An estimated 51 million people internationally are expected to lose their jobs in 2009, and with the unemployment rate on the rise, how does one find career opportunities fast? One great option is Twitter. Twitter (Twitter) is evolving as another resource, in addition to traditional methods, for both job searching and recruiting.

For example, CAPTCHAs prevent scalpers from writing programs to buy millions of tickets for concerts or sporting events. It is estimated that over 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed every day, each taking roughly ten seconds of human effort - that's 500,000 hours a day. ReCAPTCHA re-cycles this human mental effort into a dual purpose: transcribing books.

On taking over the world, and other things…

It’s been a month of milestones for Tumblr, and we thought it would be a good time to stop and say: Thank you to everyone for making this possible.

We can still remember watching your new posts come in one-by-one the day we launched. Now we’re waiting for five new servers to arrive to help us handle the 330 million (that’s 0.3 billion!!) hits and 20 million new posts we’re projecting for August.

More than anything, you continue to blow us away with the amazing things you do with Tumblr.

As our team gets bigger (we’re up to 9 people!), we promise we’re as committed as ever to making Tumblr the greatest place for everyone in the world to share the stuff they love and create.

We love you

Building Rome in a Day

Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.

This book is about lot #2334609, a piece of land known locally as the Maguire Meadow, one of the last undeveloped spaces in the Mile End neighborhood in the Plateau Mont Royal, in Montreal.

Lot #2334609 is a terrain vague — owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, owned by the City of Montreal as of June 2009, used and cherished by the community, the only green space in the Mile End. People feel free in this space. They don’t ask for permission to picnic, grow things, create art, or gather around a campfire. It’s open and wild, unlike most city parks.

To outsiders, it may look like an abandoned field. But, as you will read here, the community has appropriated this space and wants a say in how it will be developed. Development is scheduled for 2009-2010, as part of the city’s $9-million revitalization of the neighborhood.