September 2008
42 posts
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“I don’t care how many fish there are in the sea. I don’t want a fish. I want...”
– I Wrote This For You
(via fives)
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Bail-Out Overview →
Kung Fu Monkey’s round-up of the proposed 700 billion dollar “bail-out”.
In summary: It sucks.
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A Linguistic Big Bang →
In 1979 the new government of Nicaragua started two schools for deaf children. Prior to this, there had been no real deaf community in Nicaragua, and so the children that attended had a very limited vocabulary of hand signs, and no concept of grammar or syntax.
What’s amazing is that within just a few years, the children had spontaneously created a new language, Nicaraguan Sign Language,...
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The Naming of Stuff →
Just as in the original Japanese game, we had a hard limit of 8 characters for player skills, enemy skills, and enemy names, and a generous 10 for item and equipment names. The hard part is that 8 characters in Japanese can give you enemy names like 憤怒の眼光主, which romanizes as “Fundo No Gankou-Nushi” and translates as the even lengthier “Owner of the Malicious Glare.”
...
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Strange Maps →
Slightly late for Map Day, I have realised that the Generic Names for Soft Drinks map I posted came from this excellent map-themed blog.
The site presents a selection of interesting and quirky maps, which are annotated with satisfyingly punning humour. Their entry on Niam Niam: the Cannibal Map of the World is a good example, but go explore (arf arf); there’s lots of great stuff there.
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Font or Typeface? →
The FontFeed explains the difference between the words font and typeface with a helpful music analogy.
(via cameron.io)
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Cure for Hiccups
My cure for hiccups, passed down from my father, is to hold your breath, and take ten or more swallows from a glass of water. It’s not the water that is important, it’s the swallowing whilst holding your breath. Swallowing air is fine too, if you can do that, but it’s vitally important not to burp afterwards.
This technique, for me, is 100% successful, and of all the people I...
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Best Bit of the Olympics →
I saw this somewhat too late for my Grand Olympic Roundup, and then I just left it open in a Firefox tab for ages instead of posting it straight away, but ste of The Triforce recounts his favourite bit of the Olympics here.
If I had seen it, it might well have been my favourite bit of the Olympics, too.
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Religions Marco Respects for Strange Reasons
marco:
Judaism: There’s no sales pitch. No recruiting team. Nobody spamming me in the subway, coming to my door, or yelling at me on the street. If I want to learn anything about Judaism, I can just ask the many Jewish people I know. They’ve always been happy to answer my questions (often with refreshingly sensible explanations), but if you don’t ask, you’re never bothered or inconvenienced by...
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Today is Map Day!
Today is Map Day! A day for maps! If you were to ask me what day it is today, I would say, “Map Day!”
And how does one celebrate Map Day?
With maps!
Here is the first map of the day. Click on the tabs to resize the countries according to their relative expenditure on the categories of items named within the tabs themselves! Mapping fun!
Readers! Why don’t you email me...
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When I was nearing the end of my time at primary school, we had a chant. It went, “Lineker, Lineker, Lineker, Lineker, sussed you badly, sussed you badly.”
It could be used whenever someone had been sussed (badly), which, I believe, in this context, meant they had been shown up, or been proven to be wrong about something — rather than what a more conventional interpretation of...
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David Foster Wallace RIP
David Foster Wallace has committed suicide at the age of 46.
I suspect I am not alone in being currently halfway through Infinite Jest, but unlike with other books I’ve never quite finished, every time I do pick it up I think, “Damn, this is good.”
And the short periods after reading and rereading his 2006 article Federer as Religious Experience are the only times I have ever...
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : A Modest Proposal →
It is difficult to describe how much it depresses me to read this.
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Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world... →
You know… in case http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/ is down for some reason. Redundancy is a good thing.
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Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth... →
I’d recommend checking back frequently for updates.
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“New drinking game - drink whenever someone says “Cheers, mate.” Because English people say this to me about a thousand times a day. Otherwise it is business as usual. Doesn’t feel like I am abroad. The food kinda sucks.”
— From Nick’s review of England (via marco)
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SCIENCE
“One of the reasons kids get bored by science is that too many teachers present it as a fusty collection of facts for memorization. This is precisely wrong. Science isn’t about facts. It’s about the quest for facts — the scientific method, the process by which we hash through confusing thickets of ignorance. It’s dynamic, argumentative, collaborative, competitive,...
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Umbrella Today? →
Genius. Pity it’s USA only.
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Jeffrey Friedl’s exceedingly unpleasant PayPal... →
It’s stories like this (and there’s plenty more like it on the billions of sites like http://www.paypalsucks.com/) that make me exceedingly wary of Paypal, although I do still use it for small purchases.
Customer service like this is, of course, pretty much inevitable for large companies (any exceptions in the comments, please!) but, all things considered, I think if I were ever to...
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Hi, I'm a Mac… Beep, beep! →
The use of it as an analogy for Apple’s I’m a Mac, I’m a PC ad campaign is only semi-interesting to me, but I find this list of rules for writing Road Runner cartoons fascinating and amusingly absurd.
I had somehow never noticed that Road Runner never strays from the road.
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The Sad Song →
I first saw this video by Fredo Viola back in 2006, when Neil Gaiman linked to it and to the ensuing furore—the video became wildly popular, and Viola’s ISP sent him a bill for $10,000.
I thought of it again this week, and after a brief search found Fredo Viola’s current website, so I thought I would share it with you.
It’s a music video created entirely from 15 second...
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The Graphing Calculator Story →
In August 1993, the project that Ron Avitzur was working on at Apple was cancelled, leaving him without contract and unemployed.
Irritated by the prospect of all his hard work going to waste, and without anything in particular else to do, he simply carried on going into work.
He recruited his friend Greg Robbins to help him, and slowly the project snowballed. They eventually completed it in...
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Watchmarco:
This is the raw footage of the St. Paul police repeatedly tear-gassing a peaceful protest at the Republican National Convention, having given no announcements, orders, or warnings.
I have to keep reminding myself that this happened yesterday in the United States of America.
Mainstream media has not covered the RNC protests or the extreme police response.
(via Lindsay Campbell)
I...
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