now reading: Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman (and other stories)

Just finished watching Randy Pausch's uplifting last lecture. He's gotten more out of life at 47 than most people ever will. It was inspiring to see him on stage just radiating joy in the face of his own mortality.

Recently I've abandoned my calculator for Google. There's nothing more convenient, especially for unit conversions (15.23 in in mm, 5 cups in liters, etc.). It even does binary! In typical Google fashion, there are also some secret hidden values, which finally makes it possible to calculate the number of horns on a unicorn baker's dozen acre in teaspoons per light year.

This discovery led to a quick side trip into humorous units of measurement. My favorite is the Sheppey, "a measure of distance equal to about 7/8 of a mile, defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque."

This post about time traveling back to 1000 AD (followup) sparked some interesting discussion. I daydream about fantasies like this more than I'd care to admit. I think it would be very easy for a time traveler to "invent" Tetris, assuming the necessary electronics existed. Then again, at that point it'd probably be much easier to get rich on the stock market. What inventions had the greatest profitability-simplicity ratio? Positive global impact-obviousness ratio?

"Architectural designer" Eric Clough secretly built cryptic clues and objects into a New York apartment that revealed hidden messages and treasures (more pictures here). Supposedly, J.J. Abrams bought the rights for a movie adaptation. This would be an absolute dream come true for me. I spent an unhealthily large part of my childhood plugged into the old LucasArts and Sierra adventures, and I always wished I could experience something like that in Real Life. I think there could be a huge market for immersive experiences where guests hunt for treasure in puzzle-filled ruins or infiltrate a secret base while avoiding guards. There are already similar attractions in the form of the more elaborate haunted houses. The one in Japan's Fuji-Q Highland had a 1 km route through a zombie-infested hospital. Guests are given tiny flashlights and follow a dark, snaking path for about 50 minutes. There were even actors that would actually chase you through the corridors. Now being trapped in Resident Evil wasn't my idea of a good time, but I think it shows how a large-scale role-playing attraction could work with a enough visitor throughput to be profitable.

21 leaf clover!

Mesmerizing video of magnetic fields. While possibly entertaining, this is a superpower that would be highly distracting with only marginal utility.

The recent discovery of water ice on Mars has revitalized hopes for finding traces of life. Nick Bostrom argues that stumbling upon Martian fossils "would be extremely bad news for humanity." Charlie Stross offers some different perspectives.

now reading: Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

All of a sudden, it struck me as very strange that I only see the back of my own head about once every few months - when I get a haircut. On the other hand, people around me see the back of my head nearly as often as the front. Come to think of it, in olden times there were probably people who went their whole lives without ever seeing their own faces. I'm also troubled by the fact that I've never seen my own scalp, which is maybe the only reason I'd ever shave my head. I mean, what if there was something weird under all that hair?

This month's National Geographic has a delightful article on psychedelic nudibranchs. It's a wonder how such a visually striking creature has gotten so little attention until now.

How we work. How we procrastinate.

This song made from fragments of the movie Alice in Wonderland has been in my head all damn week.

Some survival tips for an unplanned free fall. As much as I'm adverse to danger, some part of me secretly hopes that one of these esoteric bits of information that I'm filling my head with will come in handy some day.

Why does New York get all the cool installations? The Telectroscope is an enormous "telescope" that links New York and London through a tunnel beneath the Atlantic. It's so great that they created a story behind the device and even had a giant drill bit emerging from the ground before installing the actual Telectroscope.

Earthquake lights are mysterious glows or flashes that allegedly appear in the sky when tremors occur.

If pain is the body's way of telling you something is wrong, then why does it have to hurt so much? It seems counterproductive for the body to impair its own performance or even incapacitate itself with pain. I propose shifting the entire pain range down a few dB.

Ice sphere maker.

Colossal Castle or Humble Home? Equally priced homes in different parts of the world

I should just put up a permanent link to the New Yorker. In the current issue, there's an interesting article about a chef with tongue cancer and how the experience has shaped his understanding of taste.

Another good New Yorker read on invention. The author explains that there's a certain inevitability to the discovery of big ideas. In a way, these ideas are floating out there, waiting to be found, which is why inventors and researchers have independently arrived at the telephone and evolution and the light bulb and calculus. I remember another writer arguing that if you could go back in time and save either Einstein or Shakespeare from a premature death, you should go with Shakespeare. That's because without Einstein, somebody still would have eventually discovered relativity, but without Shakespeare, we'd never have Macbeth.

And another New Yorker article on photo retoucher Pascal Dangin. I wonder if he reads PhotoshopDisasters.

A thunderstorm hits an erupting volcano in Chilé. This somehow led me to Pixdaus, which, along with FFFFOUND!, provides enough pictures for about a year's worth of wasted afternoons.

Two from Neatorama: The origin of the Nokia ringtone and a new blog of optical illusions.

I remember reading about The New York City Waterfalls a while ago. Is it just happening now, or is it annual? Having narrowly missed The Gates in Central Park, I'd really love to see this installation.

Wushu with lightsabers.

Cyberdyne is real, and they're making robots!

In case you were wondering, here's what's underneath it all.

In the late 90's "pop-culture historian" Bill Geerhart wrote to infamous serial killers, posing as a friendly kid. 10-year-old Billy was thinking about dropping out of school and wanted advice. The replies range from amusing to unsettling to depressing (via Boing Boing).

Apparently, it's pretty difficult to get the Canadian Post to not deliver a letter (via Freakonomics). Though you probably couldn't get away with what you could on credit card receipts.

Jared Diamond writes in the New Yorker about New Guinea's culture of revenge wars. The matter-of-fact tone of Diamond's former guide and the absurdly convulated rules for fighting make the story read almost like a dark comedy. But then you realize that it's all real, and it's so much more disturbing. It would be easy to look down on the New Guinea Highlanders as a primitive group, but Diamond argues, just as he does so often in Guns, Germs and Steel, that there's a rational basis behind their seemingly inefficient behavior.

This Damn Interesting article about Operation Pastorius is a great reminder that the United States has always been royally screwing people over for its own interests.

I expect that we'll be eating vat-grown steaks sometime in the near future, but I really hope that the road there doesn't include brainless, quivering meat-creatures. But then again, that's probably still much less horrifying than what happens in the industry today.

KayakPaddling.net is a perfect example of how to make an interactive instruction manual. It's truly a fantastic piece of design. Now if only I had the desire to go kayaking...

It seems like whip-making would be an interesting trade to learn. I wish I'd known about this book back when I wanted to be a dashing archaeologist-adventurer. Now that there's no rush, I guess I'll just wait for the interactive flash version.

I'm currently working through the Planet Earth series, which consists exclusively of jaw-dropping footage but jumps around a bit too much for my taste. If I had an HDTV, though, I'd probably be watching the series right now and deep into the night before eventually collapsing of exhaustion. On an HDTV, I can watch baseball for hours on end. Anyhow, Earth-Touch is another great resource for nature lovers that hosts short HD clips of all sorts of animals and environments. It's like having little windows into all parts of the world, but presumably less smelly.

On other planets, the most common plants could be red, blue, or even black. Think about it.

8-bit Yamanote Line! I watched the whole damn thing. I regret nothing.

Time is a harsh mistress.

When should the Wandering Jew start worrying about sleeping with his own descendants? The answers are absurdly detailed and esoteric.

now reading: R.K. Narayan, Malgudi Days

Interesting New Yorker article about.. elevators (supplementary video). It strikes a great balance by weaving a true story with a fascinating inside look at the industry. According to the author, the door-close button in any modern elevator has no effect, which took me a while to accept as truth. I'm surprised, however, that some people think crosswalk buttons have no effect as well. Not only does it make the light change faster, the walk signal won't even come on at most intersections unless you press the button. Is that different outside of California?

Another long but worthwhile read - NY Times article on cellphones spreading in the Third World. They also published a nice complementary article in January - The Afterlife of Cellphones.

The world is running out of helium!? I'm no expert, but isn't running out of an element kind of a big deal?

Complex results from small amounts of data:
Super Mario in 14kB of Javascript
20-second clarinet solo in 1KB
Complex patterns that come out of Conway's Game of Life
The Demoscene - minute-plus animations (some with soundtracks!) generated with 64KB or less
Some demos are as small as 256 bytes

This post was inspired by this month's Seed, which has an interview with fractal pioneer Benoît Mandelbrot. I thought fractals were only good for generating pretty pictures until I heard a lecture about the coastline paradox. It seems only fitting that the deeper one digs into the field of fractals, the more interesting it gets. And if not from the pretty pictures, the names alone would be enough to draw anyone in. Who can resist terms like Cantor Dust, Sierpiński Carpet, and Menger Sponge? Especially when it's a Level 3 Menger Sponge!

currently reading: Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

Not only has the Olympic torch become a lightning rod for anti-China criticism, when it's all over, the relay will have produced 5,500 tons of carbon emissions. But all controversy aside, the torch itself is certainly a work of art that can be appreciated on its own. I'd love to visit a gallery of past torches, but I guess it's only possible in digital form for now. Howstuffworks also has a page on, well, how the torch works.

How It's Made videos are my new time waster du jour. At five minutes each, they're great spontaneous diversions, though it's hard to watch just one.

Proof that YouTube comments are the dregs of the internet (via Waxy).

Recently took a flight on Virgin America, which had too much fluff for my taste. Does anyone really want to text chat with strangers on the plane? I was delighted, however, to find a small selection of TED Talks on the entertainment system. I've yet to see one that wasn't utterly fascinating.

Creative bar codes.

The Monty Hall Problem has a simple, perfectly good explanation, but it still feels like a paradox no matter how many times I read it. The same subtle pitfall that makes the Monty Hall Problem so counter-intuitive has also crept up in some famous psychology experiments.

Functional geographies - France, Taiwan. What are some other countries with useful shapes? The Chile lockpick?

Extreme papercut art. These would go much faster on a LaserCAMM.

I feel that the term "love letter" makes no sense when it is used in the phrase "a love letter to fans."

MySong generates an accompaniment to a vocal melody (via Futurismic). Luckily, it doesn't work on the fly, which is why you're not living in a musical right now.

I had no idea that Jack Handey is a real person. Deep Thoughts is absolutely timeless, but the official site is annoying, so get them in text form here. Handey has also written several New Yorker articles (via Metafilter).

I'm such a sucker for pretty clocks.

The Yellow Drum Machine wanders around, looking for objects to drum on. When it finds something that gives a good sound, it composes a little song. It's incredibly near-sighted and has trouble navigating around, which somehow makes it so much more adorable.

That's right, I said "adorable." Let me offset that with this clip of someone shooting flying cars with a rocket launcher.

Google Maps as a magazine navigator. Google Maps as a geo-novel.

Matt Frondorf drove from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, snapping one picture each mile of the way. Here's a trip in the opposite direction, but as a time-lapse video.

A gallery of some unique intersections and terrible traffic jams.

Plate tectonics! Why is it that subjects that were so boring in school are suddenly interesting now?

The mantis shrimp is the only animal on Earth that can see circular polarized light. Their eyes contain all sorts of weird structures that let them perceive over 100,000 colors - 10 times more than humans can see. According to a researcher, "They're enchantingly violent. They catch other animals by either spearing it through the heart or smashing it to pieces. Unlike most predators that grab prey, these pummel it and destroy it. When they interact with each other over a burrow, they use their armored front appendages and smash each other on the face. Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can't pick these up. They're really great animals to have around."

I've always had a soft spot for products and stores with ridiculous names. Lame puns, nonsensical word choice - the absurder the better! So I wish I hadn't seen this list of Onomastic Sobriquets in the Food and Beverage Industry, because now I feel compelled to visit them all.

Some time ago a nearby sushi restaurant was rechristened "Chocolate Chocolate Sushi." Recently, the name changed again to "Tofu House and Chocolate Chocolate Sushi," with the "sushi" written so small as to be nearly invisible from the street. It's certainly memorable, but that particular combination of words doesn't seem like the product of a sane mind.

A surprisingly large number of celebrities turn out to answer the age-old question: Who would win in a fight - a minotaur with a trident or a centaur with a crossbow?

Prince Rupert's Drops are raindrop-shaped pieces of glass that can withstand hammer blows on the fat end but explode when the tail is even slightly damaged.

Posts from the International Association of Time Travelers forum (via Kottke).

Find out what happens when George Clooney Googles George Clooney. Also, some deleted scenes here. A while back, the cast of Ocean's Thirteen gave an entertaining interview in Time.

I don't actively follow celebrity news (never watching TV helps), but George Clooney always comes across as a pretty well-adjusted guy, especially considering his positive involvement in politics.. Natalie Portman is another celebrity who handles her position well, and she gets some great coverage in a recent NY Times article about stars promoting various causes. It's indescribably cool to read that Portman is an avid supporter of microfinance (maybe even cooler than the fact that she wrote a paper titled "Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy"). The same issue has several other articles worth reading about philanthropy and organizations working for social change.

Speaking of microfinance, Kiva is the first organization that's ever gotten it right. The idea is that our economy works because of loans. Loans enable us to start businesses, buy property, and basically build a functioning society. But HALF OF THE WORLD live on less than $2 a day and have no borrowing power whatsoever. These people are born into extreme poverty and live day to day. That's why in most of the world, people who are poor stay poor. And since the poor are unable to create new businesses and the infrastructure for a healthy economy, countries that are poor stay poor as well. Kiva fixes this by putting money directly into the hands of those who need it - entrepreneurs in the Third World. The organization has a list of people asking for a specific amount for a specific reason (i.e. woman in Ecuador wants $800 to start a music shop). Any visitor to Kiva's website can then lend money to these people. The loans are gradually paid back, and the lenders receive news about the borrower's business. A few hundred dollars isn't much, but it lets even the poorest people bootstrap themselves out of poverty and stay that way.

Kiva is part of a new wave of social entrepreneurs who are making huge innovations in helping the poor. Philanthropists have been throwing money at Africa for years with very little effect. Most of it disappears down a black hole of corrupted officials. Some of it might actually reach those who need it, but it's like giving a man a fish instead of teaching him how to fish. These countries need to develop infrastructures that are sustainable - economies that can grow without constant cash infusions from richer nations. And to do that, we need to start getting smart about how we approach social change.

Kiva hits on two major ideas. The first is that the poor should not be treated as beggars. By receiving loans rather than donations, borrowers maintain their dignity and gain a huge sense of empowerment. They realize that they can actively improve their lives, which just doesn't happen with free handouts. And just because these people are poor doesn't mean they're not trustworthy or economically savvy. In fact, Kiva loans are just as (if not more) likely to be paid back than any other loan you can think of.

The other idea is that the key to eliminating poverty is giving the poor a way to generate wealth. Providing health care and education (two focuses of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) only aims to alleviate the symptoms of poverty. If you give the poor a way to make money, that money will go straight to improving health and education. These people are just as rational as you or I. It's been shown time and time again that once the poor are making enough to survive comfortably, they will start using their additional income to send their kids to school and buy better food. And when enough people reach this level, you can easily imagine how a formerly impoverished country starts to turn itself around as a whole.

But it's not like we have this whole poverty thing solved. It is exciting, though, that we're starting to apply our creativity and resources to the problem in new and better ways. We sent ourselves to the moon and created the internet and make amazing advancements on a daily basis. There's no reason why we can't apply our skills toward solving the problems of the Third World. Paul Polak, founder of IDE, points out that "a billion customers in the world are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.” What could an army of engineers do about that? And not just engineers. Kiva, after all, was started by a business major. What could we do if we brought our economics and business and other knowhow to bear?

Of course, it's never that simple. Many smart people have been tackling the issues for years. I fully agree with Polak that we need nothing less than a revolution in education. We need to learn how to design products and services and solutions that will make lasting changes. And that means designing for the true needs of the end users, rather than what we think they want. Polak, with his background as a psychiatrist, is a pioneer in this way. He understands that to design a water pump you have to go out to the fields and talk to ten, a hundred, five hundred farmers before figuring out what that pump needs to be. A traditional engineer would design a super-strong machine that lasts a decade and pumps a massive amount of water. But it will cost a thousand times more than any $1 a day farmer could ever afford. Polak's pump breaks down and moves far less water, but it's ultra-cheap. A farmer on the lowest rung of the economic ladder could buy this pump, double or triple his income for the year before it disintegrates, then use the money to buy two new pumps while expanding his field. Designing for a customer like this is worlds apart from designing for, say, the U.S. market. In Burma, the price of a few screws could make or break a product, and such radically different priorities require a radically new approach to the way we design.

The other major hurdle is sustainability. Polak often says that that "the world's cleverest designers... cater to the globe's richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture, and Maseratis." Much of that is simply because you can only make a tiny fraction of a traditional salary when doing development work. The answer for this goes back to treating the people we're trying to help as customers, rather than beggars. IDE Bangladesh and Myanmar, for example, sell water pumps for a profit and spend money on marketing, even commissioning locally-produced movies to help sell their products. While this may seem counter-intuitive, having a sustainable business model is the right way to effect lasting change. There's no way to pump enough money into an impoverished country to lift it out of poverty. Instead, we need to stoke the country's economic engine, and it'll do the rest of the work itself. Economic principles work the same way over there as they do here - people spend money, it goes back to fuel more growth, and so on. While the margins are obviously different there than they are in the First World, Myanmar alone is a market of over 55 million, and that's a huge number to multiply with. Unfortunately, the numbers don't work out to be high enough to attract the amount of talent that the industry could use -- yet.

Things are still pretty bleak in far too much of the world. But we're moving in the right direction. I'm sure there's a much better future in store.

currently reading: Avram Davidson, Rogue Dragon

All the water and air on Earth gathered into spheres on the planet's surface. Seem surprisingly small at first, but it makes sense if you consider the fact that the bottom of the ocean and the edge of space are only a few miles apart.

Animated timeline of human migration. We wandered around for over 100,000 years before inventing agriculture. From that point, it was basically the blink of an eye before we were sitting at computers writing blogs. Makes talk of the next singularity seem somewhat more believable. Similar animation of the history of religion.

360-degree videos have arrived! Each frame is like one of those Quicktime VR panoramas, which are still a good cure for a case of wanderlust. Some of other good sources of immersive media: Arounder, Panoramas.dk, WHTour, Tokyo VR Project, and Brovision.

This water-powered outpost makes me want to take up kayaking.

One instantly noticeable thing about Taiwan traffic (aside from the terrifying state of anarchy) is that traffic and crosswalk signals have countdown timers. Installed to improve safety, the timers were actually found to increase the number of accidents. I saw a similar article about a study that showed red light cameras also increase accidents (people slam on brakes to avoid running yellows and get rear-ended). I tried looking for the specific article, but couldn't find it in the mountain of relevant links. Humans just weren't meant to control giant hunks of steel moving at high speeds. The sooner we have robots behind the wheel, the better!

Kinetic sculptures. The last one (by Theo Jansen) is completely wind-powered.

Fun POV video. Light drawings are a great way to spend a lazy evening.

Bouncing liquid.

Karate chop in slow motion. Apparently, everything turns into jelly when you slow it down enough. Some more videos here and here.

Recently, many publications have been taking a look at the melting of the Arctic and the impending rush for newly accessible land. This account in Foreign Affairs is one of the best I've seen so far. The Northwest Passage is opening, fish are moving north, and Greenland is seeing a farming boom. There are tumultuous times ahead.

Another undeniable, frightening trend is the drying of the West. The development of the western U.S. was made possible only by an abnormal period of wet climate. And this period has come to an end. I think it won't be too long before we start to see northward human migrations. Canada is looking more appealing by the minute.

Last week engineers released a massive torrent of water into the Grand Canyon (video) in an attempt to restore the ecosystem. I can just imagine the survivors of the apocalypse coming across that headline on a decaying newspaper unearthed from the rubble of our civilization.

Why does one molecule smell of spearmint when its mirror image smells of caraway? Smell is a weird, weird sense. Fragrances and flavors are some of the hardest sensations to describe, since the sheer variety of nuances simply outstrips our everyday vocabularies. Instead, those in the industry use a different "vocabulary" based on referencing other smells and tastes. That's why you see wine descriptions that talk about hints of chocolate and oaky notes. They never made sense to me until fairly recently, because even if you understand the words, you don't really understand them in the olfactory context until you've actually experienced them.

I previously wrote about reusing tiles in video games to save memory. This comic points out that the clouds and bushes in SMB are actually the same! I feel so simultaneously impressed and cheated.

A 3D graphics engine written in Excel.

A German art group has programmed a robotic arm to "handwrite" a Martin Luther bible. I once saw a neat demo of two Comau robot arms. One held a whiteboard, and another used a dry-erase marker to repeatedly write and erase the company's name. The arm with the whiteboard then started to rotate and translate in space, while the other arm moved with it, continuing to write and erase without missing a beat. Mathematically, it was just a simple coordinate transform, but the effect was amazing. Anyhow, bible-writer 2.0 should dance like that as it writes!

Neatorama has a nice gallery of bridges. Make sure to check out the links to other galleries at the bottom.

The "art island" of Naoshima (flickr gallery) hosts a number of contemporary art museums. I'd love to head out there with a suitcase of books and just lose myself for a month.

Japanese scientists were able to capture the entire birth of a traffic jam on video. Traffic is really the result of one thing: tailgating. When somebody taps on the brakes, the person behind has to brake harder, because he or she is too close. This continues down the line until the braking force becomes high enough to completely stop a car. That's why traffic can grind to a standstill for no apparent reason. But it only takes a few good drivers to smooth out the flow. Clive Thompson writes about an engineer who realized he could "eat" traffic waves by trailing the car in front of him by so much that he never had to stop. This effect can also be seen in studies that show how just a few cars with adaptive cruise control improve overall traffic. There's absolutely no reason why we can't avoid congestion with good driving practices, which is what makes stopping on the freeway so infuriating. Driving schools need to wise up and start teaching people how to not drive like idiots.

In 1984 NASA launched a giant cylinder covered with 86 panels of different materials to measure the long-term effects of exposure to space. I'm not sure what happened to it when it came back, but they could've put it straight into an art museum.

NIGHT Windows is my favorite gallery of Japan photography. Amazingly, most of the pictures are completely devoid of people, which really captures the lonely feel of a Tokyo night. If you're looking for more, The Night views of Seto has some great nighttime panoramas.

One thing that's often said of Japanese culture is that it's so alien from that of the West. I think this especially stands out when examining Japanese mythology. Pop culture has familiarized us with the gods and creatures of Greek and Norse myth. Tolkien has taught us all about trolls and dwarves and dragons. Everyone's heard more than a few fairy tales. Basically, you can travel any Western country and not be too surprised at the fables you hear. But Japan has a completely different set of legends that really have no counterparts in our culture. The creatures of Japanese myth are so wildly inventive that the only way to describe them is "alien." Just take a look through the (beautifully illustrated) Obakemono Project to get a sense. You'll also know what I'm talking about if you've seen Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Heisei Tanuki Gassen Pon Poko, or, to a lesser degree, Paprika (with its recurring parade sequence). Some of my favorite concepts - objects with souls and animals that become shapeshifters when they reach a certain age. A fox that lives to a hundred can transform into a human and grows an extra tail for each passing century. I love detailed, completely arbitrary rules like that.

The Kuchisake Onna is an ancient Japanese legend that became a modern urban one.

currently reading: Gene Wolfe, Storeys from the Old Hotel

826 National is a non-profit that teaches kids creative writing. Each chapter features a themed store straight out of childhood fantasies complete with an assortment of fake products. Among these are the Pirate Shop, The Echo Park Time Travel Mart, Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., Brooklyn Superhero Supply, The Monster Union, and The Boring Store (a spy shop). We need more organizations like this in the world!

30 creative bookshelf designs. Allow me to add the staircase shelves and the bookseat.

Organizing books by color. Looks amazing, but it'd probably be maddening in practice.

When I visited London, one of my favorite places ended being the British Library. Right as you enter, there's this giant wall o' books that contains the entire collection of King George III. Aside from the hugely impressive collection of books, the architecture was also rather stunning. It seems like every great city always has a great library. I'm looking forward to checking out this collection of library photography the next time I'm at a book store. Slate has this slide show of some newer buildings, and Deputy Dog has also pointed out these two unique libraries.

This book store in a converted Dominican church won an architecture interiors prize. Everything about it just looks so right. Kids Republic is a rainbow colored book store in China.

The top five most stolen books are apparently used like a form of underworld currency.

Man, getting a Netflix subscription was like turning on a faucet I never knew I had. And the faucet spews movies. There goes everything I wanted to accomplish this year.

I saw 300 a few days ago, which definitely works much better as a comic than a movie. Even with the new subplot, there's really not much more than an hour of material there. It was interesting poring over the movie's Wikipedia page and IMDB trivia, though. It's surprising that some of the very modern-sounding one-liners can actually be attributed to historical figures. And I was tickled by the statistic that the word "Sparta" (and its derivatives) was used 0.62 times a minute. I wonder how that compares to the typical Smurf conversation.

The armadillo girdled lizard is my new favorite reptile. Sorry, turtles hibernating in refrigerator!

There are some fantastic posters at History Shots. If they weren't so absurdly expensive, I'd stick one right on my bathroom door. It'd probably take a year to read the whole thing.

Well, spring is definitely here, as evidenced by the birds nesting in my planters, making it so I can't water any of the flowers, resulting in their untimely withering deaths. Oh, the irony. Anyhow, at least I'm glad I don't live in icy Portland, Oregon, where friction no longer exists. See more cars crunching together in this Russian tunnel.

People counting cash in different countries (via Gigazine). I guarantee that every counting method besides the one that you use yourself will appear incredibly strange and non-intuitive. Is it just money that's counted differently? Or just things that come in sheet form? From now on, I'm going to make it a point to count money like the locals do whenever I travel.

Spent a gorgeous President's Day weekend in Yosemite. The weather was perfect, and we practically had the whole valley to ourselves. Winter is definitely the time to go! Incidentally, I finally caved and got a Netflix account after getting back. I took advantage of the streaming video feature and saw a lot of old films that I'd always been meaning to rent. One of these movies was The Shining, which I'm glad I watched after getting back. Coincidentally, the interiors of the Overlook were based on Yosemite's Ahwahnee Hotel.

I'm also glad I read this after the trip. The Enigma of Amigara Fault is a short manga about mysterious holes that appear in a cliff after an earthquake. The shape of each one perfectly matches the outline of a specific individual who is then drawn to the hole and compelled to enter. The idea is so disturbingly creepy that it's worth looking over the weak ending.

Time Guardians. These would go well with a few chicken wire ghosts.

Hedgehog grater. Hedgehog paperclip holder.

Pictures of the abandoned Detroit School Book Depository.

Drawings of weird letter-shaped rooms. Here's the whole neighborhood.

1000 villagers on an island, 900 with brown eyes, 100 with blue. Anyone who learns their own eye color must commit suicide. One day, an outsider visits the island and mentions to the entire tribe that some of them have blue eyes. What happens? The answer is that 100 days later all the blue-eyed villagers commit suicide. Wikipedia also weighs in.

Drivey is a minimalist driving simulator that makes a great screen saver. Another one of my favorites is Holding Pattern, which shows the landscape drifting by through an airplane window. I wish they hadn't put pictures of people in some of the views though. Given the choice, I'm sure that most people would rather not have to look over someone's lap to see outside the plane.

currently reading: Jim Steinmeyer, Art and Artifice

Space has a smell!? Apparently, it's that of "pleasant welding fumes." Well, I'm glad we finally got that answered. I'd also like to know what DNA tastes like. If you just had a big ol' spoonful of double-helixy goodness. Somebody should get cracking on that.

I actually don't dislike the smell of welding, though I have had several traumatic experiences associated with it. Aside from setting my pants on fire twice, I've also nearly formatted my brain by hitting the trigger with my mask up. When they say "don't look at the spark!" maaaaan, they aren't kidding! It was probably the only time I've ever experienced being completely stunned. My vision wasn't affected so much, but my mind went totally blank for a few seconds. I just froze, completely aware that I was spacing out, but unable to do anything about it. It was like someone hit the pause button on the universe.

The new IKEA ad is pretty nifty! I like the old 360-degree spinning ones more, though (one two).

A few weeks ago, I saw a Japanese show about fish tank decorators. One guy made incredible terrestrial-looking landscapes using all sorts of grasses and shrubs that happen to grow just fine underwater. I'm not sure if it's the same guy, but here's a gallery of some similarly jaw-droppingly gorgeous tanks. I was inspired and promptly visited every fish shop in the area before becoming discouraged by my lack of money and ability and slinking back home. I spent the rest of the day watching TV and gorging on tangerines.

The most surprising part of the BBC's Life After People is how quickly all evidence of human civilization would disappear after everyone vanishes. On a geologic time scale, after just an instant there'd be absolutely no record that we'd developed intelligence, culture, technology... Maybe it's not so crazy to look for dinosaur relics on the moon. After all, it's quite possible that intelligent beings have evolved and become extinct in the past, only to be lost in the mists of time. Perhaps the longest-surviving remnants of the human race will be our vehicles on the moon or our probes drifting in space.

I was going to somehow tie that into these pictures of things embedded in asphalt. But hey, it's late, and I'm going on vacation tomorrow!

I'm very curious about the miracle fruit, which supposedly makes sour and bitter foods taste sweet for as long as two hours after you've eaten it. It would be absolutely mind-blowing to bite into a lemon and have it taste like lemonade!

Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2007 (2006 here).

Maps of undersea internet cables.

Evolution of tech company logos. There's clearly a trend toward more iconic logos, but the older ones are certainly more fun to look at. I'd take wizened dinosaur fish and 1,000-armed flaming deities over plain text any day.

This story about an iMac and bumbling Danish police benefits a lot from being a contemporary of Zoolander.

Recruit has a pretty neat advertisement that's a lot like the recent Jumper commercials. But instead of a kid teleporting through commercials, it's a fat guy running through the web. I'm not going to try to explain it further, just take a look here.

Very well-executed ads for an Olympic sponsor. Too bad we don't really have morphing T1000 athletes to compete for our amusement.

The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" aka "trash vortex" is a giant "'plastic soup' of waste" twice the size of the continental US. I'll bet reporters live for this kind of article. It's not every day you get to think of as many possible ways to describe a "slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water." I had fun just typing that!

Legend has it that occasionally a large group of rats will fuse together into a giant entity known as a rat king. Oh man, I wish stuff like this actually happened in real life. Well.. maybe not this one. But something similarly cool with less vermin.

I lost a couple of hours today to The Powder Game, an updated version of the venerable Falling Sand Game. As with Line Rider, looks like there are many talented fans out there with a lot of free time.

Fascinating conversation in this month's Seed between writer Will Self and anthropologist Spencer Wells. Wells throws out the fact that, based on DNA analysis, we now know that humans "nearly went extinct about 70,000 years ago. We dropped down to 2,000 people."

Moof! Sigh.. I really want a dogcow. Might be willing to settle for a pandog, though.

Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies ever. It's strange that a movie that repeats the same scenes over and over is so infinitely rewatchable. According to this account, Phil relives February 2nd for at least four years. The screenwriter Danny Rubin reveals on his blog that it was actually ten years, though he likes to imagine it was 10,000.

If Osama's only 6 degrees away, why can't we find him? Aside from the fact that the last few degrees probably wouldn't be too cooperative, it turns out the research that originated the famous 6 degrees of separation concept was flawed. The theory actually doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.

One magnetic curtain, one rocking bed, add to cart.

My coworker recently introduced me to the interrobang. This has just supplanted the upside-down question mark as my favorite punctuation symbol. Alt+8253, if your font supports it. Also see the interrobang's other unpopular friends, the sarcasm mark and irony mark (zing!).

When did this happen? I was searching for hamburg steak recipes and got a website with a Japanese URL.

This still impresses me to no end: "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Arnold weighs in on the age-old vampire vs. werewolf question. I just realized that I have his autograph.. on my diploma.

People who are really good at stuff:
Speed climbing
Cup stacking
Tetris
Stamping
Dice stacking
Pen spinning

and my personal favorite: drawing a perfect circle

Some of the most memorable internet videos have been those of people demonstrating superhuman talent in pastimes that nobody even knew existed. One great example of this is video game speed runs, which really started to gain momentum with Quake Done Quick and eventually spread to just about every game ever made. There are even runs of user-created levels, like Kaizo Mario World (more here). One player even overlaid 134 attempts at stage one, creating a sort of many-worlds interpretation of the Mario universe (several links pilfered from Metafilter). Reminds me of the movie Next with Nicolas Cage (which I only saw because I was trapped on a long United flight). It's fun to imagine that all the deaths that occur in a game fade away like collapsing quantum states, and the path that's left in the end is a perfect string of just the successes that took place. After all, it wouldn't make sense for the hero to fall down a bottomless pit, right?

In college, music and rhythm games were just getting popular, and I got sucked in by one called Beatmania. I eventually got to a level where I realized that I could've learned a real instrument with all that time I'd spent playing. Instead, I just had some useless skills at punching buttons in time to simulate music. I experienced a huge bout of gamer regret and took a long hiatus from gaming. But I still kept an eye on how the industry was progressing, and I eventually started to watch speed runs of new games, since I didn't own the consoles that could run them. It felt like I was somehow saving time, since I could watch someone blaze through all the stages in a few minutes and be satisfied without having to slog through them myself. Of course, that certainly didn't make too much sense. A few years later, I finally came to terms with my hobby and learned that life's not just about gaining "useful" skills or always having to do something "meaningful." Sometimes, we need to appreciate the "subtle pleasures of wasting time." Arguments like "are games art?" aside, when it comes down to it, games are fun, and there's certainly value in being able to kick back and enjoy a few moments of simple amusement. After all, even pastimes that are more universally respected have more or less the same results. After my breakup with Beatmania, I actually did manage to teach myself guitar, and the equation was still time and money in, pleasure out. Would have been much different if it had been Guitar Hero instead?

Like the previously posted monster sketches, Yeon Doo Jung takes children's drawings and ups the fidelity, in this case by taking photographs. You can see his work at Wonderland (via Metafilter).

In the UK, people are combining photos and banknotes. In Japan, they're folding Turban Noguchi. And I thought money was just for buying stuff.

This juxtaposition of street maps is a striking composition. Each city exudes so much character from just a small slice of its layout. This site does the same for subways.

Vladstudio has a very pretty collection of desktop wallpapers. I was particularly captivated by this world map with the land as oceans and the oceans as land. I could spend hours daydreaming about this imaginary planet. When I was a kid, I used to wander around the house with a mirror under my nose, imagining what it'd be like if everything were suddenly inverted. It's completely different, but I somehow got the exact same feeling from this map.

This picture of shadows gave me vertigo for a minute when I first saw it. It's a lot like the National Geographic photo of the camels.

Annie Leibovitz does another round of celebrities as Disney characters. Even though I'm not a particular fan of any of the celebrities photographed, it's still exciting to see the characters portrayed by real people. Disney's been going downhill for a long time now, but my childhood memories, and the fact that the company still manages to produce a few flashes of greatness now and then, will probably keep me a fan for life. It's really a heartbreaking relationship, though, especially since Disney misses so many opportunities, despite having many people within the company who could really turn things around. I have my fingers crossed that someday the folks behind Re-Imagineering will be running the show. EPCOT Central can be brought on to consult.

Books correlated to SAT scores. I think the creator has his head on straight about the conclusions that can be drawn from these charts (not many). But still, he sure is inviting a lot of flames with the title of the website.

Averaging several photos of a single person makes face-recognition software perform better. That's a really good idea. Why didn't someone think of it sooner? There's not much else to say about that.

Overcoming Bias has been temporarily replaced with an automated quote-posting machine. It's put up a ton of thought-provoking and/or amusing quotes from a huge range of sources. They're up to 9, but it's not too late to catch up with pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Incidentally, here's a New Yorker article about one of the most quotable Americans ever, Ben Franklin (even if he was often misinterpreted).

Gapminder is an amazing tool for comparing the populations and GDP's of countries over time (via Think or Thwim). Worldmapper, which resizes countries based on a variety of metrics like carbon emissions, is also food for thought.

It's striking how much of an impact these visualizations make considering how often we're beaten over the head with the statistics on which they're based. It just goes to show how bad humans are at wrapping their brains around large numbers. In high school, I participated in a competition that was all about estimating huge quantities. For instance, approximately how many ping pong balls would it take to fill up the sun? How many Chevy Impalas would fit end-to-end between the Earth and the Moon? You only had to guess the unit and power of ten, but I don't think I came close on a single question. What does it mean to have a hundred billion pennies? I'd have no idea unless I actually saw it. Clive Thompson hits it right on the head when he points to our inability to understand large numbers as a major source of our humanitarian problems. "We'll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the US for lifesaving surgery, but we don't offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur." We're outraged when a serial killer murders five people, but our eyes glaze over when we hear about the millions starving to death all over the world. The examples are endless. At least humanitarian groups are starting to catch on to this phenomenon and developing materials like The Miniature Earth that make large-scale, global problems much easier to grasp.

I suppose many of the same things can be said of government spending, with billion-dollar budgets and TRILLION-dollar deficits. As far as most people are concerned, any unit above a million is just another term for "really big."

An economist's take on altruism.

Understanding the economies of scale can also result in huge profits. UPS saved three million gallons of gas by using routing software to reduce the number of left turns taken by their trucks.

Understanding art for geeks. I didn't want to laugh at these, but I couldn't help it. I guess that also describes the entire lolcats experience.

You know how your voice sounds different to you than it does to others? I think it'd be neat to have a device that would let you hear how someone's internal voice sounds.

The flight traffic above North America is so dense that you can see the shape of the continent just by looking at the airplanes. The video comes from Aaron Koblin, whose homepage, along with other sites like Flight Explorer, shows just how congested the skies have become. In fact, there are so many planes flying around that their contrails are having a significant effect on global weather. Interestingly, scientists have theorized about this for a long time, but it wasn't until 9-11 that they actually got a chance to make direct observations.

I took one of those arbitrary job tests in high school, and it told me that I should be an air traffic controller (or a park ranger). Anyhow, I used to think that air traffic was like juggling flaming chainsaws - a sort of organized chaos like you see in the oft-linked video of FedEx planes dealing with a thunderstorm. So it was interesting to see that, at least across the Atlantic, there's actually a huge virtual highway, complete with eastbound and westbound lanes. After taking the job test, one of my classmates was basically told, "you are impatient with stupid people - you should be an engineer." I'm not sure why that's stuck with me for so long, but ever since then I've been trying to convince myself that that's not the reason I became an engineer.

Stunning HDR photos from Japan. Some look amazingly like hyper-saturated paintings. I wonder if photographs would take offense at being mistaken for other mediums.

Hitler banned from iSketch. Hilarity ensues.

> get knife
> stab polonius
> say to ophelia "get thee to a nunnery"
Hamlet - The Text Adventure is by far my favorite graphics-less game of all time.

Lore waxes nostalgic for the early days of noisy, 1980's-era computer equipment. Aside from the screech of dot-matrix printers and dial-up modems, I also miss the sound of degaussing CRT monitors. I'd revel in the anticipation of pressing that button after resisting for a few hours, thinking about all that.. gauss that had built up.

School performance is based on names? Apparently, students with the initials C or D get lower grades than those with the initials A or B.

I finished 3/5's of a philosophy minor in college, and it's always been a favorite subject. I'm actually terrible at doing philosophy, but I certainly loved reading and hearing about it, especially the thought experiments. After a day of studying heat transfer and stress fractures, it was so refreshing to have a heated argument about brains in vats or Chinese-speaking computers. Ask a Philosopher and the quizzes at TPM are also a great source for some though-provoking material.

Between movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend and books like The Road and The World Without Us, it seems like we're in the midst of a post-apocalyptic renaissance. The History Channel is speculating about Life After People, and even Pixar's getting in on the action with the desolate junk fields of WALL*E. Is this just a way to reflect on our increasingly probable fate of eradication through global warming? Or do abandoned landscapes strike some sort of deep-seated, universal part of the human psyche? Nearly everyone's had those dreams where you're wandering around an empty town devoid of life.

I think part of the appeal is the stimulation of taking a step back and realizing that humans probably won't be around forever. In fact, it's presumptuous to think so, because on a geologic time scale, we've only been around for an instant, and we're already facing multiple self-created threats of extinction. While most people don't base their everyday actions on this sort of thinking, it's fascinating when humans actually DO take our impermanence into account. Have a look at this article about the nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain. A proposed warning plaque would read "Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves a powerful culture. This is not a place of honor... What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us... The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours..." There's something so deliciously sad and lonesome about imagining another civilization finding this message millennia after we've faded from the Earth. Although these were created with a much warmer intent, the Voyager and Arecibo messages evoke similar emotions for me. Is it strange to be nostalgic for humans even before we're gone? I guess it's impossible to be nostalgic after we're gone, but still...

The D-Day invasion filmed with just three people. Part of the BBC's Bloody Omaha. (via Metafilter)

Pentagram did a fantastic redesign of Dairy Today magazine. The new cover is instantly iconic and makes such a huge visual impact. This is great design.

I've always been fascinated by ligers. Seeing this post about a zorse inspired me to look for other rare animal hybrids. Luckily, someone else has already compiled a great list with pictures. Wolphins? Pizzlies? They're all right here!

Mostly arbitrary ratings of national flags. I actually found the lowest-ranked flags the most interesting to look at.

Similarly, the most useless flash clocks are often the prettiest to look at.

Sanyo's SolarArk is quite a sight to behold. I refuse to read the page in detail, lest it destroy my fantasy that the SolarArk is a sun-powered laser cannon for vaporizing Earth-threatening asteroids. The 2005 Expo in Aichi was full of buildings just like this that housed all sorts of rides and movies. One was even a giant kaleidoscope! I was there for two days and had the time of my life. It was honestly like a short trip to the future. The site was larger than Disneyland, with daily attendance sometimes breaking 100,000. When I drove past the site again last summer, the entire thing was gone. It was a very sad feeling, as if an entire city had disappeared forever. Maybe after a few decades have passed, I'll wonder if it ever happened at all. I guess I'll probably still have the astronaut food that I bought at the Mitsubishi pavilion, which I'll never eat. Should have gotten the space ice cream instead of the space octopus balls.

Hyena men gallery. That is all.