Don’t read on if you like knowing things and you don’t have time to waste. Seriously, Colin, stop reading.
Via Ken Jennings’ blog is Sporcle a trivia-set game site. It has games where it asks you to name anything from the planets to Time people of the year.
I did as expect in some and worse than I expected in others. I got all the US States but blanked on much of the Balkan region in the countries of Europe. (And West Africa is hard).
not an “international” spelling bee. So why are we letting Canadians in it??
It’s about time we stopped letting those canucks in there. What’s next? Red coats??
I think I need to start a petition…and a website… Keepthenationalspellingbeenational.com
I haven’t talked about him in a few years but I’ve been following Oscar Pistorius, the young South Africa double leg amputee that runs fast enough to compete in able-bodied events. His goal was to compete in the 2008 (able-bodied) Olympics.
I was just expressing my consternation last week to a friend that he’d been banned based on his carbon fiber lower leg prosthetics “giving him an advantage” and being against a rule that appeared to be written by the running governing body solely to ban him.
Well, unexpectedly, he got reinstated on Friday. He still needs to cut half a second off of his 400m time before the Olympics to qualify, but if he does, he’ll be able to compete.
Check out this video of him competing in Rome. The ground he makes up starting in the last turn is pretty amazing.
My brother pointed out a a Firefox extension called YouTube Comment Snob that hides youtube comments that fail criteria like “user-defined threshold of spelling errors (using Firefox’s spell-checker), excessive punctuation, and excessive capitalization.”
Awesome. Do they make that for the whole internet?
In our modern world, borders still change. I find this fascinating. Particularly this list of territorial disputes. I mean, there’s even a dispute between Georgia and Tennessee.
One of the most ridiculous things is the territorial claims of the Republic of China (Taiwan, in common terms), illustrated well in this wikipedia graphic:
In many ways the real crazies seem to hang out on this list of active autonomist and secessionist movements.
According to a report in the Register, this is apparently a reoccurring problem.
Swedish police are quizzing “people of limited stature” with criminal records following a spate of robberies from the cargo holds of coaches - possibly carried out by dwarves smuggled on board in sports bags.
I was discussing this with my 6′ tall” friend, Andy and this was our conversation:
Andy: I could not do that job
Adrian: be a midget robber?
Andy: yup
that would be difficult for me
Adrian: yeah
you’re a little tall
Andy: oh yeah, that too
I was thinking that I just abhor thievery
Do you remember these? No, I’m not talking about that song, but about Oreo Big Stuf Oreos:
These things were like a big cookie sandwich with what I remember to be fully 6mm of oreo cream in the middle. They apparently had 13g of fat and 316 calories each. They must have had 20g of trans fat each (and, yes, I know that math doesn’t quite work out).
I thought about them the other day because they were the reason I learned that you weren’t supposed to touch food you were offering other people. I took one out of the packaging and offered it to our babysitter as my parents were still getting ready to leave and my mom said something like “She’s not going to want that if you’ve touched it” and offered her one which was still in the packaging. (I don’t believe she wanted either, actually, but this was 22 years ago, so what do I remember?)
This is what the internet was made for. Example:
SO ALSO IN KINDERGARTEN I APPARENTLY THOUGHT THAT THE KIDS IN MY CLASS DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT COUGARS FOR SOME REASON, BECAUSE I DEFINITELY MADE A SWEET COUGAR QUIZ WHICH I INSISTED ON GIVING OUT TO THE CLASS THE NEXT DAY.
WHAT COLOR IS THE COUGAR? GOLD? NO! BROWN? NO! RED? NO! THE ANSWER IS TAWNY.
There are many, many stories like this.
California has weird license plates. You can your ham call letters, a press photographer plate, an Olympic Training Center plate, a Veteran plate (anyone, in fact, can get a “veteran” plate)
One of my favorite things is the requirements for a horseless carriage plate:
These special plates are issued, upon request, for motor vehicles with an engine of 16 or more cylinders manufactured prior to 1965, or any motor vehicle manufactured in 1922 or before.
Huh?
but I still laughed. Any dance based around the Tide To Go pen wins some points in my book.
Colin wiil (or should!) like the dance moves around 0:48 in.
— google.com ping statistics —
3371 packets transmitted, 1963 packets received, +36 duplicates, 41% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 220.423/3869.926/29006.648/4186.343 ms
Most of the time, my pings were in the 1 to 10 second range. 41% packet loss! Ridiculous!
Today was pretty good. I’m glad I came to Kaohsiung. More on that later.
As of now Google News is putting stories about the aftershocks of the earthquake at the Calaveras fault in the sports section. Nope, wrong San Jose earthquakes.
One of the weirder wikipedia pages: list of people who have disappeared.
The older ones are full of mystery and are pretty interesting. The newer ones are largely kidnapped kids; kidnapping kids is not interesting or fun; kidnapping kids is sad.
Gawker has a piece about blog cliches. It’s pretty funny/ damning:
Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar.
Likely originating in the reverse (”worst [x] ever”), this clich still has a deathgrip on the media, in all its sincere and sarcastic permutations. It’s usually taken to mean a state of permanent, perpetual bestness, which is of course unsustainable. Sooner or later, something will not be the best [x] ever, and this phrase is a perfect example.[undesirable counter-example], not so much.
…
Oops. I might do that…
The other piece that’s similar but less funny/ more precise is Gothamist’s What Not to do With Your Blog from a couple years ago.
Both make me think about how I write my blog.
Possibly the best japanese game show, or any game show. A foam board with a shape cut out in it moves toward you. You have to fit through the shape or you get knocked into a pool of water. Unexpectedly hilarious. (From Melissa.)
A bunch of inmates in the Philippines do the Thriller video. It’s meticulous and awesome. We’ve seen it at a wedding and in a movie but this may be the most impressive. (From Dave)
Michel Lauziere performs “The Toreador Song” from Carmen on 300 some bottles, hitting them with sticks attached to his roller blades. Very cool and I never would have thought of doing it this way. (From Andy)
Google SMS is awesome. You simply text what you want to GOOGLE (466453) and it texts you back almost instantly with what you need.
Traveling in Boston last week, I used this a lot. (It should be noted that I have unlimited text messages.) Don’t know where that bar was? Text “the littlest 02116″. Is my flight on time? Text “AA 631″. What time is that movie showing? “Eagle vs. Shark 02139″. What’s that froyo place’s phone number? “Ankara Cafe Boston”. What’s the weather going to be the next day? “Weather 02139″.
All of these things got me the exact information I wanted quickly. I’m impressed!
Extreme ironing competition. It is what it sounds like. Some great ones in there.
I was totally right. I saw one of those minature personalized license plates yesterday and bought it. It was pretty excited. I never see “Adrian.” My roommate said that “Adrian” had to be in the top 50 most popular names. How to resolve this? The Social Security Administration to the rescue!
Their site will show you top 20, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 names for any year back to 1880 (1880’s most popular names? John for boys, Mary for girls). In the year I was born, 1980, Adrian was the 115th most popular male name with 2,387 total Adrians that year.
The top 10 names from that year:
- Michael
- Christopher
- Jason
- David
- James
- Matthew
- Joshua
- John
- Robert
- Joseph
You can also check out the fads, how a particular name changed in popularity over a period of time.
After the jump how “Adrian” has varied since my birth year.
Miranda July’s new website for her book No One Belongs Here More Than You is lo-fi (so to speak), reminding me, actually, of spultek’s old website which was scanned from a hand sketch. She made the entire website by taking photos of a “whiteboard.” It’s a good idea and great execution.
Miranda’s the same person who wrote, directed and acted in the quirky and funny 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. I’d recommend it.
My radio show will be at the same time this quarter: Wednesdays 10p-midnight (PST (or PDT?)).
Meanwhile, if you want to read me ranting about music in a different forum, you can check out my music blog.
Update: Here’s this week’s playlist
And here’s the NEWSPECIALFUN:
Wikipedia has everything. Including Bristol Stool Scale.
[Update: Graphic removed; it was too…graphic.]
A couple guys (professorial types) in Bristol wrote a paper on it. Goodness.
I noticed today when I logged in to Netflix that they had a new option “watch now.” They have a whole lot of movies that you can stream and it’s included in my subscription.
It’s a win for them (server bandwidth << shipping costs + wear/ depreciation of DVDs) and a win for me because I don’t have to wait…
except they don’t support mac.
Keep trying, Netflix.
Those google people are CRAZY.
I noticed the other day that there was a new option on my google map, traffic.
Looks like I should take the 280 and avoid the 101. It’s a bit slow around 92.
[I just learned it’s about three weeks old and it’s only available in 30 cities so far. When’s the Bay Area going to get google transit anyway?]
From the same people that brought you that spectacular bouncy-balls-in-San-Francisco Bravia ad (which, incidentally, first alerted me to the amazing Jose Gonzalez) comes another amazing commercial. It’s basically a building demolition/ fireworks display, except done with paint.
The commercial is pretty great by itself, but go ahead and watch the making of as well. The actually did all of that (as they actually dropped a quarter of a million bouncy balls down the hills and streets of San Francisco). There’s something really cool about doing something that would be a little cheesy with computer graphics instead with real materials, people and dollars (or pounds, as the case may be). The Brits seem to have the corner on that market, starting with that ridiculous Honda ad a few years back.
Daytrotter has some mp3s of a recent in-studio by Elvis Perkins. They’re four songs, all originally on Ash Wednesday. The voice recording is a bit boomy but they’re otherwise good.
I haven’t talked about music much lately. I’m about to unleash a slew, so steady yourselves.
NPR has Arcade Fire’s performace from last Saturday at Judson Memorial Church in NYC both streaming and download. The first few minutes are a bit rough fidelity-wise because the band starts the show in the audience for the first song.
Also heresay has mp3’s from the Friday Judson show, all split up nicely.
I understand writing stupid things in wikipedia, but sometimes people write really, really odd things. For example, someone ammended hair:
Sometimes the hair can become transparent. I don’t know how this happens but it just does. Beware of transparent hair, and if it does happen to you quickly use your own urine as shampoo.
Of course, it has since been editted out.
(Thanks to Jesse for this. I can’t link to him anymore because he abandoned his blog.)
I found a site which is a nice bike route maker. In a lot of ways it’s similar to runthere.com (or many others, I’m sure), but it does a few nice things that are important to cycling; in addition to the total mileage, it’ll tell you total and net elevation gain, average grade and max grade and show you a nice elevation profile. It also gives you the current weather conditions. Apparently it’ll show you where steep grades and even show you photos along routes but I didn’t run into either of these features actually in use. I found the interface a little slow at times, but nice otherwise.
It uses google maps, so it probably works everywhere, but lists a dozen or so cities, probably because it has weather information, etc coded for those.
holy crap. I think this is the best blog post I’ve seen, possibly ever. Well, done, Wax.
it’s awesome having fast internet again. my mind has a problem slowing down to dialup speeds.
Notice anything new about the page?
Look to the right over there…
After Randy’s comment on my post about being inspired to keep track of some life stats for 2007, I was further inspired to put up some of the stats in more or less real time. So there they are. Are there any other stats you want to see? The full list of stats that I’m tracking:
Originally I was going to do this literally updating every time you loaded the page, but that made the page really slowly (even slower than it loads already), so I decided to write up a caching system where it only loads the new data every six hours. I might adjust this if it makes sense to.
The script checks to see if the cache is older than 6 hours old and if so pulls some data from a google spreadsheet. Otherwise, it writes the old data into the html that you see on the right. I’ll probably write up a full post or a instructable of how I did all this sometime when I have more time.
I’m going Web2.0 all over this place!@
There are a few links I’ve been meaning to put up. Things I find interesting but I don’t want to add to the sidebar on the right.
Random links:
[This was going to be one post with the above part 1 and below part 3, but it was too much, so I split them up]
There was recently the kottke best links of 2006. Here are some of my favorites from that list (including some I’ve seen/ linked to before):
Idea #1:
What if the Internet Turned into a Were-Wolf
There were a number of the links on that kottke best links of 2006 list that I had already seen, but I’d enjoyed.
I don’t really get into webcomics much, but I’ve been really enjoying xkcd “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”
It’s pretty geeky stuff, generally. Some of it reminds me of jokes friends would make in college (like thing jwerberg said about the Apollo 11 space shuttle and it having the same computing power as a TI-85 “and that thing can’t even do tan 90!”)
There are some of my favorites.
I may relate a little too much to some.
Some are at the heights of geek humor while others are just sort of random.
I’m fascinated by little perculiarities in our world. There’s a country, which is soverign over a city, which is only 0.2 square miles in size. That’s 108 acres, much smaller than a large urban park. (Also of note with the Holy See/ Vatican is that there are various Vacitan enclaves on separated from the Vatican and surrounded by Italy, including Castel Gandolfo and Patricrchal Basilicas, but they’re sort of like embassies with extraterritorial status.)
People also seem to be fascinated that Lesotho (formerly Basutoland), where my mom spent much of her youth, is completely surrounded by South Africa. Well that makes a lot more sense to me than Büsingen which is a German town completely separated from Germany and surrounded by Switzerland. It is separated by about 1km from the rest of Germany.
It’d be kind of cool to live there though. You get alternate addresses and telephone numbers if you want people to call or write to you in Germany or Switzerland. You also get to live and work in Switzerland without a visa after living there for ten years.
There are a couple entertaining videos that I found or ran across in the recent times:
Aries Spears impressions while freestyling. This is a guy doing impressions of LL Cool J, Snoop Dog, DMX and Jay Z while freestyling. It’s pretty dang impressive, though I’m not familiar with DMX at all and only somewhat familiar with the other three. I’m still very impressed. (A couple things of note: a) that’s Live 105, in SF and that’s the same studio where I did the college dj of the week thing and 2) it appears Woody, one of the hosts, is a Steelers fan as he’s sporting a hat and a Willy Parker jersey). (via stereogum)
Peyton Manning Mastercard Priceless Ad. I can see how you might not like Peyton Manning, but man, I love this commercial which started running last year. They have a second, similar one this season but it’s not as good. I laugh every time I see this one.
[Update:] Oh man, I found another Peyton priceless commercial and it’s hilarious too. Also, there’s a blooper commercial from the first Peyton video and the making of (including the actual commercial at the end) a third in the series.
Over two years after its completion, I finally posted my Coke Can Birdman Costume on instructables. Part of the motivation was the Halloween Project Contest.
If you haven’t seen them there are some funny or awesome videos floating around.
The band Ok Go managed to make one of the most entertaining videos (QT WMV) I’ve seen recently simply with a few rented treadmills and a borrowed video camera. That is some serious choreography. They also choreographed a back yard dance routine for one of their other videos (QT WMV). It’s not quite as entertaining, but it’s still fun.
Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager has a title that speaks for itself.
The “Chinese Backstreet Boys” are a couple Chinese college students who record video of themselves while animatedly singing along to Backstreet Boys songs. I Want It That Way is pretty great while As Long As You Love Me is more for completists.
Dave Eggers writes about the World Cup. Very entertaining as alwasy.
The Baseball Card Blog for those of us who spent too much time and money on baseball cards as a kid. They’re currently on #5 on their best baseball card sets ever. I have a few packs of #5: 1989 Upper Deck. It was the year my family went on a New England road trip and we went through Cooperstown and saw the Baseball Hall of Fame. I picked up some of the new Upper Deck cards there. I hope #1 is 1987 Topps, the one with the wood grain. I loved those cards.
My friend Leo’s been working on a website called Runthere for a while. It’s pretty cool. The function I use most is mapping out a route and finding out how long it is. I’ll also show you the elevation profile for the same route.
He’s recently added a feature where you can save and, optionally, share routes around you. You can also find routes that other people have saved.
It’s a pretty slick site. I’m impressed. He’s a mech e, like me, and didn’t have a whole lot of programming experience before ME218, just like me, but I’m struggling to make a php website for the radio station and he’s made this pretty cool site.
I’m thinking of starting a new periodical post with the wikipedia articles I’ve read in the last few days. You know, make this an actual web log of sorts. I read quite a bit of wikipedia.
Upper St. Clair (my home town(ship)—check the demographics of USC out. Pretty sweet, huh? 94.56% White, 4.02% Asian) to Bethel Park to Mt. Lebanon to Pittsburgh Light Rail.
brooklyn to brooklyn neighborhoods to williamsburg to hipster to argot. new york city to bronx to bronx neighborhoods (which one’s yours, jdawg?). staten island (wouldn’t it be funny to live on staten island?). alameda, california (an island off of oakland).
