strange animals traveling in twos and threes » Etcetera

Return of the Rundown

Ben — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:59:15 +0000

Timewaster: Typewar. Think you know fonts? Try this game, which you’ll either find completely boring or riveting.
Best aggregated reference word site: Wordnik. My favorite reference site right now. All about words.
Maps of Disaster: Informative, curious, unnerving. View map (or maps) of the world, with icons of disaster superimposed. For added effect, project image onto your office wall. You’ve got things under control. (This is: a service of the Hungarian Emergency and Disaster Information Service)
Best specialty science-writing blog: Tetrapod Zoology. Fascinating, curious, informative, and detailed without alienating those not totally familiar with the science at hand. Aside: I want this book.
Best easily digestible good news story: “Feeling grumpy is ‘good for you’” (via BoingBoing). Bonus: “File photo” used for BBC article appears to have been taken from One Foot in the Grave.

Now returning with more frequent posting, longer entries, better images, AND THIS

Ben — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 20:04:05 +0000

You’re welcome.

More tk.

(via 2modern)

Cleaning House (Rundown)

Ben — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:58:46 +0000

It turns out computers can figure out what language you’re speaking without actually hearing you. In at least some controlled circumstances, anyway. (NewScientist, via Monochrom)
“Astonishingly”, (1) people forget their passwords all the time, but (2) the ever-helpful “secret” “questions” are not really either — at least, not as far as security is concerned.
If I had a car I needed to get into on a regular basis (as in, for driving), this would be wicked awesome. It’s not everyone who can open a car with his shoes.
And this video montage is just kinda sweet.
This post is a good example of why I’m recently drawn to reading Tetrapod Zoology on a regular basis. The lead-in sentence (I think) sells itself:

I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire dinosaur family tree was screwed up beyond belief, that ‘dinosaurs’ had evolved from random assorted diverse archosaurs, that cladistics was rubbish, and that all mainstream palaeontologists were idiots.

Read on.
I am still waiting for these business cards made out of meat to get real. (No, not like that.)
Without having perused it much, Ficly at minimum stands out as an interesting concept — a place for collaborative story-telling (in a time & place where social networks are, weirdly, moving us away from that kind of collaboration). (via SimpleSpark)

And now…

Ben — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:31:50 +0000

Went away. Came back. Pictures. You know how it is.

New (Old) Pictures

150% Awesome

Ben — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:10:05 +0000

If I had a wall large enough for this (and didn’t have the wall covered with dry-erase board), this graphical representation of the internet-as-subway would certainly be an excellent contender for posting.

Which is a too wordy way of saying, this is awesome.

You can theoretically put in to order one when they’re printed, but good luck with that; they’re only printing 1,000. A lot and not.

(Also, they do have a hi-res version available for the downloading. So if you were feeling particularly energetic, and not at a loss for toner, you could rasterize the image, print it out on however many 8.5×11″ sheets of paper it takes, and assemble it yourself…)

One of many

Ben — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:10:25 +0000

I like Youtube as much as the next fellow, but for me it hasn’t really become the time sink that it easily could be. That said, I think Vimeo may be my Youtube… There are some really amazingly put-together videos hanging out there.

This, for example, is amazing:

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

But this one is really good, too. And this one.

Self-reassembling robot

Satisfaction

Ben — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:50:45 +0000

I don’t know why, but I actually feel good about having only seen 10 of the things on this “Definitive List of the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced on the Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something.” Admittedly, the 10 I’ve seen were pretty good. (Well, eight of them. Well, seven.)

But who doesn’t love a good list?

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Easy see, easy do

Ben — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:22:38 +0000

The psychologists chose to vary the font, because it is easy to manipulate in the lab. After the students had all read the instructions, the researchers asked them some questions about the exercise regimen: how long they thought it would take, whether it would flow naturally or drag on endlessly, whether it would be boring, and so forth. They also queried the students about whether they were likely to make exercise a routine part of their day.

The findings were remarkable. Those who had read the exercise instructions in an unadorned, accessible typeface were much more open to the prospect of exercising… Most important, they were more willing to make exercise part of their day.

The Scientific American article seems to put things in a bland and overly simplistic way, but the idea itself is interesting (and at least a little intuitive).

(via Lifehacker)

Dinosaurs and Star Trek

Ben — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:30:43 +0000

Shiny.

(via BeaucoupKevin)

Escape!

Ben — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:52:43 +0000

This is probably what I hoped I’d see when I watched Tom O’Horgan’s Rhinoceros (with Gene Wilder.. but not as a rhinoceros):

(via BoingBoing)

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