February 21, 2007
Lots and lots of books
Virus, a flash based tile game
Virus is a very simple, addictive flash game; using the colors available to you at the bottom of the screen, convert all the tiles on the board into a single color. Similar colored connecting tiles become part of the viral mass. Via.
Planetary Maintenance Engineer
Imaginary Homelands
Imaginary places in detail: Start with a wonderful overview of megastructures in science fiction and examine a dictionary of 76 locations from recent fantasy novels. Then move on to the interactive maps: Mordor, Narnia, the Simpson's Springfield, England as seen in many stories, New York in fiction, Lovecraft's New England, maps from almost any video game, Star Trek, the Marvel Universe, and the DC Universe.
Quel Pays
Recent Kitchen Comments
Recent comments about the food. Oklahoma University has turned their complaints about campus dining into one of the most hilarious blogs on the internets! IT WASN"T COOKED! Awesome.
Free music files and notes
music files is a neat site I found while looking for information on a classical piece I'm learning on guitar. It seems to predominantly cover classical music but also covers other genres. It has biographies, mp3s, sheet music and so on.
Impressive, Hoopz. Your dribbling has gotten much better in the past few weeks.
Tales of Game's Studios Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa. [youtube trailer]
disclaimer: I haven't actually played it. The title & idea alone seemed amusing enough for it to be worthwhile posting.
Beware Young People
A CNN scare piece on the rise of teen "sport killings" lead off with the story of a group of teenagers who brutally murdered a homeless man and then blamed it on violent video games. Penny Arcade's Gabe responded with an equally inflammatory, though tongue-in-cheek, post blaming the parents.
It seemed like just another case of the media rushing to blame video games while the truth lay somewhere else. It turns out that the stepmother of one of the murderers is an avid reader of Penny Arcade and she emailed them with the real, unreported story. (you'll need to scroll down for both Penny Arcade posts)
It seemed like just another case of the media rushing to blame video games while the truth lay somewhere else. It turns out that the stepmother of one of the murderers is an avid reader of Penny Arcade and she emailed them with the real, unreported story. (you'll need to scroll down for both Penny Arcade posts)
‘Embarrassment before dishonor!’
Climate change policy
Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. What are the climate change policy options? Paul Krugman on tax-shifting. William Nordhaus on carbon taxes vs. cap-and-trade (PDF). Mark Jaccard, Nic Rivers, and Matt Horne note that in Canada, voluntary measures and subsidies haven't worked, and propose a detailed policy package (PDF). [more inside]
That's going straight to the pool room
What should we get Erich for his birthday? How about a desk set with a radio, a thermometer disguised as a TV mast, a clock topped with a tank, a calendar, and four ballpoint pens disguised as missiles. Iconographia socialistica from the GDR.
Devotion
Mohammed Riaz, 49, found it abhorrent that his eldest daughter wanted to be a fashion designer, and that she and her sisters were likely to reject the Muslim tradition of arranged marriages.
So he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced British home in Accrington, Lancashire, and set it alight, killing his wife and four daughters while they slept in an honor killing for being "too Western."
So he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced British home in Accrington, Lancashire, and set it alight, killing his wife and four daughters while they slept in an honor killing for being "too Western."
"We're an American Bund"
"That is an American salute?" "It will be." n July 1935 Heinz Spanknobel's Friends of New Germany (FONG) established Camp Siegfried in "Yip Yip" Yaphank, Long Island (postcard). The Camp Siegfried Special left Penn Station every Sunday at 8:00; tens of thousands of summer campers enjoyed Nazi salutes, Nazi rallies, and Nazi swimming. [more inside]
"It was just six years of my life."
WANTED: The Limping Lady. The Gestapo's poster read "She is one of the most valuable Allied agents in France and we must find and destroy her" but Virginia Hall, who used a prosthetic limb after losing a leg years before in a hunting accident, eluded them and saved countless Allied lives while working as a spy during WWII. Additional biographical information, as well as the biographies of other famous female spies, at WWII Female Spies (which has many outgoing links to other great informational resources about female spies in WWII).
BRING IT ON
Good Luck.
Craig Ferguson of The Late Late Show gives Britney Spears some advice. (12:30m YouTube. It's a monologue. And it's not really about Britney all that much.)
Coming soon to dirt near you.
Soon you may find yourself in the company of mushrooms. If you're curious about them, Mykoweb, Tom Volk's Fungi (especially his FOTM section), Fungal Jungal, David Fischer's American Mushrooms, MushroomExpert.com, BCERN's Matchmaker and the recently mentioned Roger's Mushrooms are remarkably handy, replete with descriptions and keys for reading up and identifying whether something growing in your yard is heavenly or hellish. The North American Mycological Association maintains a list of affiliated clubs, too, if you want to enlist help in identifying something.
Web Something.0
iLike "provides a buddy-list for your iTunes - it helps you discover new artists based on what you're already listening to, and it helps you browse your friends' music libraries and share music suggestions with each other." Basically, there's an iTunes plugin (OSX only) that automatically sends your iTunes metadata to the iLike site to be shared with the community.
You'll put your eye out
Before the repeating rifle, there was the repeating airgun. While most people consider the airgun a toy, it has an interesting history as a serious weapon. Now large bore airguns are seeing new interest amongst discerning gun collectors and hunters of big game.
You think about sex. We do the rest.
“To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.”
You had to live -- did live, from the habit that became instinct and the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.
For Your Eyes Only? Allegations that the government is reading your e-mails, with the help of AT&T. The latest episode of NOW did a good piece on the NSA's domestic surveillance program (previously discussed here.) It can be viewed on their website. Meanwhile, Canadian human rights attorney Maureen Webb has written a new book on the scope of government surveillance, and found that the use of sophisticated methods to search for terrorists is not identifying the right suspects.
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