Ørsted was a Danish physicist and chemist who made numerous contributions to science. He is probably best known for discovering that electric currents can induce magnetic fields, paving the way for breakthroughs in electromagnetism – and, ultimately, leading to modern communications solutions such as cellular communications, and countless others.

He also had an impact on modern philosophy and was the first person to explicitly describe and name the ‘thought experiment’. One of the most commonly-known examples of a thought experiment is ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ that provides an hypothesis used in quantum mechanics.

As a critical thinker in the 18th century, imagine the friction Ørsted must have dealt with on a daily basis from a European public largely taken with religion and mysticism.

As always, Google picks up on worthy celebrations and uses its logo to pronounce them. Which is rad.

Anyone with a WordPress blog, for example, will know the ‘Incoming Links’ section on their dashboard that displays information on who is linking to your blog. I checked the dashboard on one of my sites today and noticed a link that was quite obviously spam.

What the spammer does is create a page with a link to your site on it. If you visit that page it displays momentarily before redirecting to the spammer’s target site.

The in-between site displays for just a moment. It’s too quick for me to even get a screen grab of.

I haven’t seen this before, but perhaps I’m alone in that. Has anyone else been a victim of Incoming link spam? I guess the race is now on to develop a WordPress plugin that filters it out. Of course, not many people follow all their incoming links, which shows exactly how desperate spammers are getting. WordPress isn’t the only CMS with the abusable functionality, I’m just using it as an example because all my sites are powered by it.

Thanks Microsoft! I wasn’t busy enough already! Bleeding hell…