However, some might like to know that there's a little-publicised streamlined version, displaying just the current day's strip and access to the archive. Useful on dialup, or just to avoid the rather 'busy' main page.

At the time of writing, one can see Mario the Plumber, Homer Simpson and now Jessica Rabbit. Make sure you examine the full-size 'photos' for the complete effect, and read the follow-up posts for 'making-of' images and videos.

Why wasn't I surprised that a photo of Angelina Jolie was the primary source of facial textures for Jessica (though it ought to be Veronica Lake, really)?

At work, I have unofficial access to decent-resolution research radar data unavailable to the public (sorry) but I've discovered that the Met Office offers a low-res (5 km) version for the entire UK, updated half-hourly, I think. One can zoom into regions, though the resolution doesn't improve.

BoingBoing has highlighted a whole website devoted to such clumsy, improbable or simply incompetent image editing: Photoshop Disasters.

Some of the entries had me in tears. Of laughter, I think.

As BoingBoing says, the Usborne Book Of The Future, first published in 1979, was a beautifully optimistic look at the future (not entirely optimistic – it didn't foresee the end of the Cold War) which strongly influenced my views on technology (medical, environmental, power-generation, etc.) and many aspects of my overall character, such as my preference for hard-tech sci-fi. Some of the illustrations are far-fetched nowadays, but it's interesting to see how many projections have been achieved, if in a less grandiose manner, and how many are still valid technical aspirations.

However, after the ~10th instance, I became vaguely curious, so I used a utility others might wish to bookmark.

WhoCallsMe.com is a clearing house: post an unrecognised number to see comments from those who have encountered it before.

In my case, the caller is the retentions department of the electricity supplier I'm in the process of leaving. It seems the department has a habit of dialing several numbers and speaking to whichever recipient answers first – others report hearing general office sounds and a female voice talking to someone else. Contemptuous and contemptable.

Of course, an even simpler technique is to just type the phone number into Google; in fact, that's how I found WhoCallsMe.com.

I haven't investigated the links in depth, and suspect they may be in American rather than English, but give them a try.

Actually, that particular Visual Dictionary is rather superficial. It's worth browsing, but I don't think I'd use it when looking for something specific.

It's good to be able to examine locations from four sides, and the quality is excellent; I can distinguish the colour of the drain pipe in my back yard, and see that my curtains were open when the plane passed.

Click the thumbnail to make the plane fly closer, or zoom in, or enlarge the image, or something.

[Via BoingBoing.]

A high proportion of Ucumari's other photos are excellent, too. I'll return when I have an hour or so, as it could take time to work through 153 pages (at the time of writing) of photos, each of which would reward slow appreciation.

"There are rare words, and there are rarer words, but only a very special word qualifies as a bona fide lost word." The Compendium of Lost Words compiles a truly sinapistic* array of the extremely obscure. I'm afraid my written style isn't adequately gaudiloquent as to convey my ecstasiation at this discovery, but I love the fact that these words exist, and that someone has hunted them down. Anyone know of others?

As Stephen Chrisomalis says, a word can't really be lost, merely mislaid, or at least one fully lost couldn't be subsequently rediscovered. However, words qualify for inclusion in the Compendium by having header entries in the (full) Oxford English Dictionary and having been used in Modern, standard English (post-1650 and not regional dialect), without appearing in their proper English contexts on any readily-accessible web pages. Alternative spellings of better-known words obviously don't count.

I did briefly wonder whether the Compendium is genuine; 'ascoliasm' in particular sounds suspiciously Pythonesque, but it's a subsection of a much larger, highly-credible site, so I'll take it at face value for now.
I'd also question the strict validity of defining 'lost' as merely 'absent from the indexed web', as certain terms may be merely 'uncommon' within certain groups. For example, as an ex-academic in the field of physical geography, I recognised the word 'hyometer' immediately, and I imagine it appears occasionally in a fairly large number of journal papers, which tend to be widely-circulated in print and online behind pay-walls.

Whatever. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to return a few of these words to genuine usage – but not merely as flosculation.

I suppose this counts as my solennial reposting of User Friendly's 'Link Of The Day'.

*: Er, no, that's 'consisting of mustard'.

This is only Google Earth, by the way, not Google Maps, though I presume that'll follow eventually.

Also apparently, it was made by a sculptor called Lars Erik Fisk, who also produced a spherical tractor and a spherical UPS truck.

[Via User Friendly.]

Don't worry, I'm not attacking Second Life myself. Personally I wouldn't choose to devote time and creativity to it, but it seems harmless and if people enjoy it, that's fine with me.

Incidentally, the site requires one to acknowledge a copyright statement before viewing the images. Don't worry about it; though it's somewhat unfriendly (I'd argue it's poor design to alienate an audience so overtly), the stated terms are routine and the site owner isn't able to impose any greater restrictions than standard copyright law.
To put it another way: the site owner may wish to prohibit reproduction of images 'in any form', but there's no legal backing to that level of restriction, and 'fair use' provision still applies. I fully support the site owner's need to protect his/her intellectual property; nothing at the Ministry is released into the public domain, either, and I don't see the point of publishing under a creative commons licence. However, one can't ban fair use of content (which credits the original author), such as for purposes of review.

The advantage and disadvantage is that this is an online utility. It's accessible from any web browser without having to install software, but it also means one has to upload the source images in order to resize them. Personally, I'd be inclined to resize images in order to upload them, so there seems to be a potential contradiction!

I discovered this via Lifehacker, which cited the example of resizing a 3264x1920px photo to 200x117. For comparison, I happen to have a 2848x2136px image on this PC, which I know to be a 1.7Mb file. I suppose that's not too bad for a one-off via broadband, but I couldn't imagine using it regularly or via dialup at home.

Anyway; it's available, and may be of use. Have fun.

I don't know whether it's good that I haven't been indoctrinated or bad that I've been unobservant, but my score was low. In my defence, I only visit three of the sites regularly, and hadn't visited two at all.

'Strange Maps' is only a few weeks old at present, so it's still practical to read all the entries, but my favourite is that explaining the bizarre partition of Märkat, between Sweden and Finland.

[Via Cartography.]

I think it's wonderful; I was grinning from about ten seconds in, and I loved the climactic rainbow effect almost as much as the closing rain of pure colour.

Like its forerunner, the 'bouncing-balls-in-San Francisco' advert, 'Paint' was done for real, on a disused Glasgow housing estate, rather than as digital effects. Don't worry, hippies: the 70,000 litres of paint were water-based, non-toxic and cleaned up afterwards.

*: If I don't specify the company and product, I'm not participating in viral marketing, right?

However, there's an interesting interview with Dawkins in Salon, in which he comes across as rational and essentially respectful of individual beliefs, an approach which conveys his message very well. I wonder if my earlier impression was simply due to his words having been edited and filtered by sensationalist mass-media.

The clearly-named SayNoTo0870.Com offers a database of unpublicised, standard-rate phone numbers, which might even be answered quicker.

I thought I'd posted about this before; seems not.

Maybe it's better to be pessimistic and prepared than optimistic and damp, but it'd be even better to be correct. Today's entry in the five-day forecast simply isn't a fair summary of the conditions actually expected over the next 24 hours. How is one derived from the other – how can the 'average' be more extreme than any component interval?
Therefore, how could one plan for later in the week (surely one of the purposes of a forecast) if one has to presume the summaries of the expected weather on those days are inaccurate too?

I wish this was a one-off error, but it seems to be routine; I'm rarely happy to trust the BBC's web-based forecast in other than the most general terms. I have reasonably high confidence in the BBC Weather Centre's forecasts themselves, but there's something seriously wrong in the way they're translated to the web.

I scored something like 130 in 2003; more specifically, 133 when I took it again in 2004 (I'd forgotten the questions, so I wasn't really just retaking it!). This time, I scored 130 exactly, which is... consistent, and within the top 2% of the population, apparently.

Frankly, the test wasn't so good this time – the questions themselves were cryptic, and sometimes it was difficult to comprehend what was being asked, never mind which of the multiple choices was the answer. I suppose it's to be expected, but this and the flashy graphics seemed to be more for entertainment than efficient communication and hence accurate testing. Additionally, the mechanism for converting raw scores to age-weighted IQs seemed simplistic.

Whatever; give it a try.

Apparently, my surname is ranked 1,470th in popularity – surprising, as it's uncommon here in the UK (2,779th in 1998 – 2,095 instances in ~60 million people).
Helen's is no. 349 in the USA, and not exactly unusual here.

[Via Sonic Chronicler.]

'Serenity Rose' is a spendidly gothy comic by Aaron A: well-drawn, well-written and nicely cynical (including about 'orthodox' goths). It's not exactly a webcomic, as it's designed for the hardcopy format, but the first two 28-page issues are readable online.

Aaron also started publishing a weekly webcomic, 'Vicious Whispers', yesterday. It looks promising.

That's all. Read it.

The jokes don't always work (the hit-rate is rather low, to be honest), and some are downright incomprehensible to a non-mathematician or non-physicist (i.e. me), but when it works, it's one of the funniest strip cartoons I know.

[Known for ages, but prompted by Aardvark.]

If you're unfamiliar with 'Bad Science', have a look. The remit is to critically evaluate/debunk mainstream journalistic coverage of scientific research. Fact-checking of lazy, sensationalist articles on childhood vaccination, mobile phone radiation, etc., which cite unpublished research by under- or irrelevantly-qualified academics as fact would drive me to despair (as would disentangling this sentence's subclauses...), but Goldacre manages to keep it readable.

*: Whilst acknowledging it's because he submitted excessively lengthy articles!

[Heh. I'm publishing this one at 6:06pm on 6/6/06. Coincidentally.]

Apparently, if Nikolas Lloyd had been an official member of staff, the University would have defended his right to free speech (and initially did so), but as a visiting fellow, he didn't qualify for protection under section 43 of the Education (No 2) Act 1986, and senior University management surrendered to veggie complainants.

One side-effect is that the veggies have succeeded in exposing Lloyd's views to a far wider audience than they would otherwise have received. Now that he has uploaded the 'offending' site to his own domain, hosted elsewhere, I'm pleased to link to the essay.

And no, I have no interest whatsoever in presenting the counter-argument; it's not for me to offer a right of reply here to Lloyd's content elsewhere, and I wouldn't wish to. Contact him, not me. Comments on the issue itself are welcome here, as always, but mere veggie propaganda will be deleted without hesitation.

It's a great idea, worthy of the League of Awesomeness, but I particularly want to point out the project's Google Maps 'hack', the 'Find The Opposite' tool. Select a location on one side of the globe, and its antipode will be indicated.

The underlying assumptions are a little flawed (low-lying but totally land-locked parts of Africa are shown as at risk of flooding, and altitude is the sole considered criterion for inundation, ignoring current and future flood defences), and some of the altitude data seems odd, especially in cities, but it's an interesting rough indication.

Okay, okay; I hadn't been paying attention, so I'm far from the first to notice this – it was actually released last, er, September. Whatever; if you hadn't noticed either, visit it now.

The puzzle is the same as before: select ten items in order for them to interact in the single correct sequence, in order to make something happen.

This puzzle is midway between the fully-narrative Grow RPG and the more abstract original Grow. There is a bit of a narrative, which helps one to predict the correct sequence, but some aspects make limited sense, so there's some guesswork.

The immediate result of that burst of internet fame was that Fredo received a huge bandwidth bill from his ISP, but it also led to work producing film music ('The Sad Song' and several of his other compositions appear in 'Man About Town'), and he performed his first live concert last month, again featuring 'The Sad Song'.

Note that all the foregoing links to 'The Sad Song' lead to fairly large downloads (10 Mb+), so don't all hit his server at once, eh?

[Via Neil G. again.]

The premise is that they're photos of rooms painted with anamorphic patterns which seem random from most angles, but which, from specific viewpoints, reveal perfect geometric shapes. The photos from 'wrong' angles presumably would be difficult to fake (perhaps using 3D modelling software?), and hence are believable, but the fact that the rooms are so empty made me suspicious. On further examination, the rooms seem to be corridors, lobbies and other credibly empty public areas, so I'm inclined to think they're real.

Whatever; I like them!

[Via BoingBoing.]

[Via BoingBoing.]

[Update 23/02/05: S'gone. Transport for London's lawyers had it removed. Various people are hosting mirrors of it; at the time of writing, this one works.]

In the 1998 data, my surname exhibits a slight concentration ('3', on a scale of 1-6) in NW England, particularly Manchester and N. Cumbria ('4'), with lesser clusters ('2') extending across the W. Midlands and N.Wales, and in an arc around the fringes of London (the commuter belt). However, Shetland stands out with the highest possible concentration, '6'. I already knew my family name is Scandinavian, and I suppose the Shetlanders are predominently descended from Norse settlers. I vaguely remember reading that NW England was settled by Norwegians too, which might explain the slight concentration here but not in E. England, which was settled by Danes.

There are a few summary statistics, too, but I'm not entirely sure how to interpret a couple of them.

• It seems there were 2095 instances of my surname in the 1998 data (really? That seems extraordinarily low), up from 1746 in 1881, yet in terms of proportion of the population rather than absolute number, my surname dropped from rank order 2467 in 1881 to 2779th in 1998.
• My surname occurred 65 times per million names in 1881, and 56 per million in 1998.
• 99.27% of instances are ethnically British.
• My surname isn't recorded as being used as a forename in the UK (understandably).

[Update 07/11/07: Following a collaborative project, the Surname Profiler has been rebranded under the National Trust's corporate identity.]

Tip: don't go looking for Goatse (emphatically not whilst at work!), but if you absolutely must, make sure someone's pointing a camera at you at the precise moment you hit the dreaded link.

[Via BoingBoing]

That was quick – in November, a friend was considering 'buying' (open-ended renting, really) a block of pixels, so I noticed that about 30-40% remained available. Now the final 1,000 pixels are being auctioned at eBay. There's no point in my linking to the auction, as it'll be a dead link in a few weeks, so I'll simply say that at the time of writing, the high bid is $38,100 (£21,662.50), with more than six days to go.

I suppose people will have to start on the Zero Million Dollar Homepage. Or perhaps not.

[Update 12/01/06: That ended-up being the winning bid amount. Surprisingly, there were no further (valid) bids. I'd expected a last-minute frenzy!]

Hence, I was interested to hear about LookLater, via Lifehacker. It's pretty much the same thing as del.icio.us (searchable bookmarks online), and compatible with that, but not open for everyone to see one's private bookmarks.

I'm not perverse enough to go to the effort to immediately transfer my del.icio.us bookmarks over to LookLater, but don't expect the former to receive updates from now on.

Needless to say, it's not necessarily a matter of using LookLater or del.icio.us, so the services are complementary; some might wish to have both public and private bookmarks, but, well, not me.

In late August, the scale was such that 'Splogfighter' was able to itemise each splog he/she reported for deletion, whereas his/her current target, two months later, is for 2,000 deletions per day. That's not sp*am blog entries, it's entire spurious blogs.

At the time of writing, the blog is still quite 'young', so it's still easy to read the entire archive in a sitting, and I recommend doing so (just for interest, not practical tips).

One aspect which particularly concerns me is the possibility that if the sheer volume of splogs floods search engines, all blogs might be removed from the main indices of search engines and 'ghettoised' into Google Blogsearch or similar. There's a lot of valuable content in genuine blogs, which I think ought to be available via mainstream searches.

[Via Lifehacker]

For example, on Thursday I'll be boarding an Avro RJ85 to Brussels and another on to Warsaw, and now know that (presuming my choice of airline configures its planes the same way as Northwest Airlines) Row 5 may have extra legroom whereas Row 15 is at the very back, next to the toilets.

My slight criticism is that the view from the windows isn't a parameter mentioned, though it's one I value. The position of the wings is indicated on each seat plan, so one can estimate which seats only overlook the engines, and for planes with wings below seat level (unlike the RJ85, thankfully), one can guess which seats will have no view of the ground whatsoever. However, it would have been good if the site had provided specific advice.

Cross-checking against a photo of the plane, I think I'll try for something in Rows 10-14 (not 5; the engines are in the way), and Seats A or F (by the windows).

Does it matter? Yes, absolutely. I love flying, and spend every moment of the first and last ~20 mins of each flight staring out of the window; more, if it isn't cloudy. The trip out to Prague in June was slightly disappointing, as I was over the wing, without a view.

The site covers the UK and USA (and hence their banking & tax regimes), and simplifies the whole process whether one is a fundraiser, a sponsor or a charity.

No, I'm not planning to actually do anything specific for charity in the foreseeable future; I'm just passing on the link and acknowledging an excellent concept.

Okay, okay; if you want a specific example, try this one. Don't forget to sponsor her.
Just to evaluate the online donation system, of course.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, is an annual literary challenge to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The quote above was Dan McKay's winning entry in the 2005 competition.

Regretably, the BLFC website is a navigation nightmare, and I don't have time to explore the labyrinth right now, but the related Lyttle Lyttleton contest (same principle, but entries need to be brief) has a much more readable site – have a look.

Incidentally, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was the original perpetrator of "It was a dark and stormy night...", in 1830.

The puzzle is frustratingly unforgiving. My one criticism is that there's no 'undo': any one error ends the game, and one has to restart from the very beginning. As a couple of events rely on precise timing, this can be annoying, especially as it took me 3-4 attempts to get the timing right for the very last stage, meaning I had to repeat the whole puzzle to return to that point each time, without even knowing whether I was doing the right thing anyway. It's not too bad; the completed sequence takes about a minute to run through, so repeating it doesn't take too long.

It took me a couple of hours to solve, over most of this week, but I hear that the sequel, 'Hapland 2' is more intricate, events require tighter timing, and some of the clickable elements are barely large enough to spot. I'm looking forward to it!

The same site has a huge number of explanations contributed by visitors, but they'd all feel rather foolish if they'd spotted one simple fact.

Think about it: how could one guarantee that any one card chosen from the first page will be absent from the second?

The primary project is to construct a huge twin-tower Tesla Coil, but I discovered them via a side-project: the Taser cannon. That's Taser cannon, a 30-barrel monster firing 110kV, 15,000 amp plasma. Damage to the target "can vary widely", but Wikipedia records that though a typical stun gun fires 200–300 kV (for skin penetration), a 0.06 amp current is generally fatal. It's probably enough to say that most spectators experience discomfort from the plasma explosions.

Oddly enough, many elements of the site, particularly the FAQs, seem to be clever satirical references to other Google activities over recent months. Surely not. For example:

For example, a house three doors from mine sold last November for £37,000 more than I paid in August 2003. Four days after I bought mine, someone bought another at the far end of the street for £1,550 more and three weeks later, another went for £22,000 less than I paid (must have needed work!). I don't know any of the purchasers or previous owners, so it's not really an invasion of privacy, but it could have been.

When one starts or reset the grid, the pattern is practically random, many individual lines joining to form circles or long, composite 'snakes', with few isolated individual segments. By definition, when activity ceases, it's because there's no line linked to the last tile to move. The result is a very ordered pattern of individual segments.

Click on one of the composites and activity is likely, but it tends to be very localised and soon ceases.
Click on an individual and there's often no activity at all, as there's a high probability of there being nothing to react with.
Click on an individual in an array of identically-aligned individuals, and if they react, it's in a simple chain: activity proceeds along the line then stops. It's difficult to start, but once triggered, it goes a long way, in a predictable manner.

However, click on a composite next to an array of individuals and the brief burst of chaotic activity can trigger activity in multiple rows/columns of the ordered section, which can rapidly propagate across the entire grid, in turn triggering 'chaotic' clusters, which feed back into the 'ordered' arrays. This is a neat reminder that life flourishes best when there are balanced proportions of order and chaos!

That'd be absolutely fine for an ad campaign (which was the way the images were used), but at least to me, the (potential) lie that these are genuinely the dogs' owners diminishes any trust I might have had in the company, so I'm actually less likely to buy the advertised product than if I hadn't seen the adverts.

Not that I have a dog or eat dogfood.