Interesting Sites
7 May, 2008
Strip stripped
I don't have a particular problem with the revamped, very-Web 2.0 Dilbert.com site, and I like the fact that the archive has been expanded to encompass several years of cartoons rather than being limited to only those published within the foregoing month.
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.
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22 April, 2008
Untooned
Pixeloo is engaged in a project to 'untoon' famous cartoon characters: reproducing the original appearences using real-world lighting and textures (skin, hair, etc.). The results aren't necessarily supposed to look realistic, as the caricatured proportions are retained, but there's certainly something slightly unsettling about the hybrids.
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)?
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16 April, 2008
Spots of rain
When leaving the house for a bike ride, or even to pop to Sainsbury's, it can be useful to know the location of the nearest rainclouds – not a weather forecast but information of where it's raining at that particular moment.
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.
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8 April, 2008
Nooo!-toshop
Though I'm glad to say the spurious traffic seems to be tailing off at last, the single most popular entry in the blog deconstructs a Photoshop modification of Keira Knightley, which 'enhances' (I disagree) her anatomy for a film poster.
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.
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6 February, 2008
This book made me
One of my favourite childhood books, which still has pride of place on my shelves, has qualified as a virtual museum exhibit: the entire contents have been scanned and are readable online.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 13:13
| 124 words
17 January, 2008
Don't call me...
Since – well, I don't know, really; some time whilst I was away in late December – my home phone has been receiving more-or-less daily calls, all from the same number, all during office hours (when, by definition, I'm unavailable). None have bothered to leave a message, so I'm damned if I'm going to ring back.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 20:46
| 170 words
29 November, 2007
What's it called?
Two useful links from Lifehacker:
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 17:01
| 79 words
20 November, 2007
A gallimaufry of periphrasis
Neil discovered an interesting site, FreeRice: test your knowledge of English vocabulary whilst donating rice to the United Nations World Food Programme.
I may have another try when I have more time, but my initial 'vocab level' was 46/50.

Posted by Ministry at 13:35
| 40 words
4 November, 2007
What's on the otter channel?
The sea otters at Monterey Bay Aquarium have a webcam.
Just thought you'd like to know.
25 October, 2007
Shape of things to come
Wow. This is incredible: a sample of how web pages – inasmuch as the concept will still apply – will look in the future, as visualised (how did he do that?) by Dr. David Morgan-Mar, image processing researcher.
Very inspiring.
21 October, 2007
I can REALLY see my house from here
It's not news that Microsoft's equivalent of Google Maps features oblique aerial photography of certain areas in addition to the standard top-down vertical images. However, I hadn't realised that Lancaster is included in the coverage.
Blackpool is one of the examples used to advertise the facility, but I discovered that the coverage continues up the Fylde coast as far as my home town (and no further, nor further inland). It may or may not be coincidental that the University has fairly close links to Microsoft.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 12:37
| 143 words
16 October, 2007
LOL
'A Softer World' is sometimes a bit dark, even by my standards, but I love this extension of one of my favourite bad jokes.

Posted by Ministry at 14:22
| 24 words
8 October, 2007
Entoptic Phenomena
I suspect one might get more out of these photos by William Hundley if one doesn't initially know how they were achieved, so I'm not going to tell you; have a look at the slideshow before visiting the BoingBoing entry.

Posted by Ministry at 13:22
| 40 words
7 October, 2007
The truth is out there
In't t'Internet brilliant? Who'd have thought in 1865, when the University of Kentucky was founded, that one day it'd publish a blog exclusively devoted to moustaches of the 19th Century?

Posted by Ministry at 10:18
| 33 words
14 September, 2007
Wake-up call
This is an incredible image, one of the best I've seen in a long while and begging to be used to raise consciousness about global warming– which is how I found it at 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.
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Posted by Ministry at 14:47
| 77 words
14 September, 2007
Nerterology?
Heh. 'Murklins'.
"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'.
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Posted by Ministry at 13:01
| 300 words
7 June, 2007
And where have YOU been?
Curious about the daily life of a domestic cat, an 'owner' in Germany mounted a digital camera on his/her cat's collar, which captured images automatically at preset intervals. The results are better than I'd have expected.

Posted by Ministry at 14:52
| 36 words
30 March, 2007
Can you see your house?
This won't be of interest to everyone (then again, what is?), but Google Earth has extended high-resolution coverage of certain areas, and not only within the USA. Greater Manchester and downtown Vancouver are on the list.
This is only Google Earth, by the way, not Google Maps, though I presume that'll follow eventually.
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Posted by Ministry at 12:49
| 54 words
17 March, 2007
Get away from it all
In Britain, one is never more than 11 km (7 miles) from a surfaced road, even in the Highlands of Scotland (which is where that greatest distance may be achieved). Make of that what you will.

Posted by Ministry at 17:17
| 37 words
2 March, 2007
You're missing out
Apart from 'xkcd' and 'Dilbert', which provide one-off, self-contained jokes, my taste in web comics is for ongoing serials with well-developed stories (and not necessarily any jokes). Hence, I rarely link to them, as individual episodes wouldn't be meaningful in isolation. For example, I'd love to say that Katherine's smile in today's 'Wapsi Square' made my morning, but you wouldn't understand why unless you already knew her.
Read it (regularly), damn you!

Posted by Ministry at 10:35
| 77 words
23 February, 2007
Tagged
Truly wonderful awful visual puns depicting html tags in real-world settings.
[Via BoingBoing.]

Posted by Ministry at 12:03
| 14 words
14 February, 2007
Waitin’ For The Bus
A. questioned the accuracy of my statement that (it is at least alleged that) Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top owns a spherical VW camper van (a 'bus ball').
Therefore, I am happy to link to published evidence of the allegation.
Also apparently, it was made by a sculptor called Lars Erik Fisk, who also produced a spherical tractor and a spherical UPS truck.
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Posted by Ministry at 20:52
| 63 words
13 February, 2007
Time chart
I like this Flash timeline/clock... thing. Somehow it's a particularly good visualisation of where one is in the day, week, month and year.
The 'minutes' bar is a little unnerving, though – its inexorable creep is too clear a visualisation of passing time.

Posted by Ministry at 11:33
| 46 words
7 February, 2007
More-ultraviolet-then-purple prose
In case you missed them (I did), the results of the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are out.
Oh, and the 2006 Lyttle Lyttons.

Posted by Ministry at 12:10
| 25 words
22 January, 2007
Go outside
Apologies to fans of what The Register habitually calls 'Sadville', but Get A First Life.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 11:30
| 48 words
29 November, 2006
Fair of face
One of the most consistently popular entries in this site is my deconstruction of the Photoshop modifications made to a studio photograph of actress Keira Knightley for the promo poster of 'King Arthur'. Here's another set of examples of such modifications (without annotations).
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 09:05
| 186 words
21 November, 2006
Small but how beautiful?
Hmm. Not one for dialup, I suspect....
ResizR (I wonder how they came up with that name) does more-or-less what you'd expect: it's a single dual-function image editor allowing one to resize and rotate pictures when one doesn't have, or doesn't have time for, a full-featured editing package.
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.
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9 November, 2006
Branded
How well do you know the corporate logos of leading websites?
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 09:58
| 49 words
24 October, 2006
Cartographic oddities
The title of this site, 'Strange Maps: Collecting Cartographic Curiosa' is fairly self-explanatory. It's a blog collating examples of odd maps, whether of 'what-if' geopolitical situations or unusual existing geography.
'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.]
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Posted by Ministry at 15:07
| 68 words
18 October, 2006
Exploding with colour
Has everyone seen the 'paint fireworks' advert* yet? The UK TV 'premiere' was last night, but it's been available on the web for a while. This seems to be the best source of downloads; try the 1280x720px (37 Mb .mov, zipped) version if you're able.
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?
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Posted by Ministry at 14:41
| 131 words
16 October, 2006
Fair hearing
I haven't been a fan of Richard Dawkins' style of – I thought – stridently aggressive atheism, and I'm still not entirely comfortable with his apparent intention to teach others what to think. Evangelism is evangelism, and to be condemned, even if it's atheist evangelism.
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.
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15 October, 2006
Results in 20 minutes
I don't actually know anyone attempting to stop smoking at present, but if I did, I'd recommend this list of health benefits, not least because it includes the immediate effects. Quite a motivator, I suspect.

Posted by Ministry at 19:25
| 36 words
21 September, 2006
Don't pay to complain
A number of UK companies only publicise non-geographical phone numbers for customer service; 0800, 0808, 0844, 0845, 0870 and 0871 are typical. The problem with such numbers isn't just that some are covertly premium-rate (I believe 0870 is 8p/min via BT and 0871 is up to 10p/min) but that they're excluded from ‘inclusive calls’ billing packages.
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.
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12 September, 2006
Might rain; might not
Today's weather in Lancaster, according to the BBC five-day forecast, will be 'light rain' with 'poor' visibility. However, though the 24 hour forecast warns of 'drizzle' between 13:00 and 16:00, the rest of the day can expect 'sunny intervals' or outright 'sunny' conditions. Visibility is to be 'moderate' until 13:00 and after 01:00, but 'good' in the intervening period.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 09:56
| 208 words
4 September, 2006
IQ Test 2
In 2003, the BBC broadcast/published a national IQ test, first as a TV programme then via the web. It must have been popular, as the format has been repeated for a number of other tests since then, on current events, English language and UK-centric issues. They returned to the original topic last weekend, and I've just completed the 2006 general IQ test via the website.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 20:30
| 188 words
19 August, 2006
More name-calling
'The Sweetest Sound' allows one to assess the popularity of one's surname by providing a searchable database of the top 55,000 surnames in the Social Security Index.
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.]
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Posted by Ministry at 08:56
| 69 words
17 August, 2006
Well branded
This is a pretty good gallery of UK crop circles (1998-date), worth seeing in it's own right, but I'm mainly linking for the brilliant name: 'Temporary Temples'.
2 August, 2006
Good guys wear black
In the spirit of this being a, y'know, weblog, I'll offer a link to a site I just visited and enjoyed.
'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.
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Posted by Ministry at 12:30
| 84 words
21 July, 2006
Can you mail a blank stare?
Xkcd is "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, maths and language" all filtered though the 05:00 nihilism of a physics graduate.
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.]
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6 June, 2006
Not so bad science
If, like me, you occasionally read Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Science' column for the Guardian, you might like to read the articles at his own site instead. Goldacre has expressed occasional dissatisfaction about copy being cut*, which can change at least the intended emphasis of articles, so it makes sense to read versions unconstrained by word counts.
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.]
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Posted by Ministry at 18:06
| 142 words
3 June, 2006
Eat this
The Register reports that a visiting fellow in evolutionary psychology at Newcastle University had his IT privileges withdrawn for publishing an essay on 'Why vegetarians should be force-fed with lard' (a patently non-literal title) in his personal, Uni-provided web space.
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.
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30 May, 2006
The Ministry as a graph
As Aharef has proved by writing an applet, it's possible to analyse the hierarchical nesting of html tags in a website and visualise that structure as a graph.
Click on the image for a conceptual map of the Ministry (just the blog homepage, not the entire site) and an explanation of the layout.
[Via Siobhan]

Posted by Ministry at 20:33
| 57 words
28 May, 2006
Chemists have no imagination
What d'you mean, the periodic table isn't literally a table? Of course it is!
[Via User Friendly.]

Posted by Ministry at 11:48
| 19 words
19 May, 2006
Open & overexposed to the sun
As BoingBoing reports, zefrank.com has issued a challenge to make the first ever Earth sandwich, to be achieved by simultaneously placing two slices of bread on opposite sides of the planet.
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.
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7 May, 2006
Pass the water wings
Firtree.net uses a Google Maps 'hack' to display the hypothetical effect of polar icecaps melting and global sea levels rising by up to 14m.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 09:44
| 76 words
4 May, 2006
Grow Cube
Remember Grow RPG, which I mentioned last August? There's another one available at the same site: Grow Cube.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 18:10
| 121 words
20 February, 2006
Happy sad song
Quite a while ago, I, and thousands of other readers of Neil Gaiman's blog, discovered a wonderful, near-wordless song, 'The Sad Song', by Fredo Viola.
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.]
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Posted by Ministry at 12:56
| 125 words
15 February, 2006
Modernist trompe l'oeil
I wonder if these are genuine.
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.]
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Posted by Ministry at 12:06
| 94 words
10 February, 2006
Concerning torments
For some obscure traditional reason, all official maps of the London Underground display anagrams of the station names. Understandably, this is rather annoying, and this map displaying the correct names is extremely welcome.
[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.]
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9 February, 2006
Literally literal
'Literally, A Weblog' is a single-issue blog recording inappropriate (and hence frequently amusing) misuses of the word 'literally'.
Literally eye-popping and side-splitting. Well, not literally.

Posted by Ministry at 11:24
| 26 words
6 February, 2006
You shouldn't have. No, really.
This year, I remembered to write this entry well in advance, so that those so inclined can follow the link and send anti-valentine e-cards.
Beyond that, I don't think I need to elaborate on my earlier comments.
Nothing says "I love you" quite like saturated fat and slutty lingerie.

Posted by Ministry at 18:39
| 51 words
18 January, 2006
What's in a surname?
A joint project by three UK universities allows one to examine the geographical distribution of one's surname within the UK, both current and historic. The aim of the Surname Profiler is to understand patterns of population movement, social mobility, regional economic development and cultural identity, but to lay people, it's just interesting.
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).
Try it with your own name, but I'd better mention that since the site was only launched four days ago, and has been receiving
media coverage, it's experiencing high volumes of traffic – you might want to wait a couple of days.
I presume the academics have mixed feelings about this. It's great that population geography has caught the public's imagination (or at least tapped into the public's self-regard), but conversely it'd be good if the academics could gain access to their own resource!
[Update 07/11/07: Following a collaborative project, the Surname Profiler has been rebranded under the National Trust's corporate identity.]
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Posted by Ministry at 10:40
| 364 words
13 January, 2006
What's THAT?
Goatse is a web legend: a very graphic photo which unfailingly gets a reaction.
Don't worry, that link was to a Wikipedia entry about the image, not the image itself, but here's a wonderful Flickr pool showing people's immediate reactions on seeing Goatse for the first time. It's a portrait gallery of emotions infrequently caught on camera.
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]
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Posted by Ministry at 12:09
| 92 words
5 January, 2006
Expensive last chance
The Million Dollar Homepage is almost full.
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!]
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Posted by Ministry at 14:00
| 122 words
2 December, 2005
Antisocial software
I'm not really into the collaborative aspect of the web: I publish photos here, not at Flickr, StumbleUpon is kind of annoying, and I don't remotely support bittorrent-like p2p networking. Likewise, though I like the idea of online bookmarks which I can access from multiple computers, the publicly-shared, social element of del.icio.us doesn't remotely interest me.
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.
Less?
4 November, 2005
One more day
J. has directed me to 'The Perry Bible Fellowship' a splendidly dark comic strip, apparently updated weekly. The site design isn't great, so I would recommend browsing the archive. The PBF isn't a serial; each is a standalone 3-panel cartoon, so it's easy to dip in and read one at random.
Of course, I've just read the entire archive....
20 October, 2005
Fighting splog
Splogs, or 'sp*m blogs', blogs set up with minimal or stolen content, merely for ad revenue or to generate traffic/pagerank for undesirable sites, have been proliferating rapidly in recent weeks, particularly at free hosts such as Blogger/Blogspot.
'Fighting Splog', a (genuine) blog set up to record one person's attempt to do exactly that, is an interesting insight into the evolution and acceleration of the problem.
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]
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26 September, 2005
Are you sitting comfortably?
When I first saw this at Lifehacker, I thought it slightly more useful than it actually is, but I'll mention it anyway.
It's a site offering seat plans for a range of passenger aircraft, including airline-specific configurations. Thrilling, eh? Okay, no, but I've often wished for a little advance warning and the ability to avoid being allocated inferior seats at check-in.
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.
Less?

Posted by Ministry at 19:33
| 275 words
19 September, 2005
Pour it through the letterbox
Aardvark has discovered the website of a remarkable (well, I'm remarking, anyway) new business venture: Petrol Direct:
... selling petrol, diesel and other automotive fuels at prices up to 40% lower than high street garages. How? By mail order, sourced from other
EU countries.
16 September, 2005
Is 'Areometer' a word?
I can't immediately think of a specific use, but I'm sure the Google Areometer is something worth bookmarking. Based on Google Maps, it allows one to plot the boundary of a polygon and discover the size of the area enclosed, in a variety of units.
5 September, 2005
Bargins galor
As Lifehacker says, it's possible to save a little money at eBay by hunting for items with misspelled titles and descriptions. These will be found by fewer bidders, so there'll be less (if any) competition and, probably, lower closing prices.
Fat Fingers assists in that process. Type in a keyword, and the site searches eBay for varient spellings of it.

Posted by Ministry at 13:57
| 61 words
23 August, 2005
Painless charity
I find that one of the most off-putting aspects of participating in a sponsored event is actually asking for sponsors and collecting the money afterwards.
Justgiving handles all that hassle, leaving one to run 26 miles in a bath of baked beans, or whatever. I'm sure there must be a way to outsource that part too.
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.
Less?

Posted by Ministry at 16:24
| 135 words
3 August, 2005
In anticipation, John licked his own lips
As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.
But enough about Mr. Blackah.
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.
Less?

Posted by Ministry at 14:40
| 159 words
28 July, 2005
Poke a patient penguin
Go on, he won't mind.

Posted by Ministry at 15:56
| 6 words
20 July, 2005
It's made of cheese
If anyone's tiring of Google Maps and Google Earth (been there, done that), it's been taken a stage further. To commemorate today's 36th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, when my namesake (yes, I was named after him) made his giant leap for quoteworthiness, Google Moon has been launched.
I don't know whether it's a permanent feature, so visit it while you can. Don't forget to zoom in to maximum magnification of the landing sites, for an impressive level of geological detail.
10 June, 2005
Visit Hapland
I like puzzle games.
Released in February, it's not brand new, but I've just discovered 'Hapland'. The format is a cartoon image (Flash), in which most features are clickable. The objective is to control the activities of stick men, cannon, bells, windows, etc., in a precise sequence, to eventually open a portal. I started by clicking on everything to see what it does, (though some elements do nothing unless a precondition has already been fulfilled), but then one has to reset everything and discover the correct sequence. It's very easy to get a vital lever trapped under a rock, or forget to open a window allowing the person inside to hear a (one-use) bell, or blow up a vital man (oops).
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!
Less?

Posted by Ministry at 20:18
| 275 words
11 May, 2005
Prestidigitation
This will test how you think; specifically, your ability to question the ground rules.
Try this 'ESP Test'. You'll be asked to mentally choose a card from six offered, concentrate on it, then click on any of six buttons elsewhere on the page. That will take you to a page showing five cards. The one you chose won't be one of them. Guaranteed.
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?
Less?
4 May, 2005
Flash-fried testosterone
This is science for 'real men' (yes, I think it's a uniquely male idea):
Lightning On Demand is a volunteer organization of engineers, artists, scientists and machinists. Our key objective is to produce a controllable discharge of lightning at the greatest physical scale imaginable using modern technology.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 12:17
| 125 words
22 April, 2005
The red-headed Beatle of 1,000BC
A few months ago, random browsing discovered 'Superdickery.com', a gallery of Superman comic covers depicting paradoxical behaviour – mainly Superman torturing or killing his supposed friends. At the time, there were about a dozen examples, but I've just visited again, as the site is User Friendly's Link Of The Day, and discovered that the gallery contains hundreds of covers.
Some are stunningly bizarre (Lois Lane killing Superman by playing a Kryptonian xylophone, anyone?), but the main impression received from seeing so many in one place is of sheer repetition – Superman must really dislike Lois, Jimmy Olsen, Batman, et al., and how many times has Lois been married?

Posted by Ministry at 12:08
| 113 words
20 April, 2005
Don't forget your thermals
This is an interesting read, if you have quite a bit of spare time: guidance notes given to those about to work at US research establishments in Antarctica.
This was found via Joe Grossberg, who noted that there are two ATMs (cashtills) at McMurdo Station, and seemingly limited spending opportunities, but the vital piece of information I very carefully noted is that:
If you try to manoeuvre a Weddell seal into position for a photograph, you are breaking the law.
Remember that.

Posted by Ministry at 15:44
| 83 words
1 April, 2005
Quench your thirst for knowledge
In full awareness of the date, have a look at the latest 'release' from Google.
Google Gulp is:
... a line of "smart drinks" designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty.
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:
4. What if I don't want to use Auto-Drink™?
No problem – simply turn off Auto-Drink™ on your Google Gulp preferences page.
5. Well, shouldn't Auto-Drink™ be default-off?
You mean we should cripple a perfectly useful feature just because of a little bad PR?
6. Yes.
Okay.
Though that
doesn't go far enough, of course. I think retailers should be able to
prevent the bottle cap being removed at all.
Less?
23 March, 2005
NRT is having a massage
It says so here, so it must be true.
When NRT returns, would someone care to explain to him er, me, why this little utility has appeared online?
In the interests of research, you may like to have a massage too. Just edit the subdomain to anything you'd like (e.g. helen.ishavingamassage.com)
[Via Neil]
4 March, 2005
The pits
This is a seriously old website, so I suppose that there's a risk that anyone interested will have already seen it. It was 'Cool Site Of The Day' on 9 January, 1996, so be aware that the standard of web design is correspondingly dated!
It's a 'VR' (yeah, right) tour of a derelict nuclear missile launch site somewhere in the USA. Kind of interesting.
Via the main home page of the same website, there are two other underground tours, of the Paris catacombs, and of the author's basement.

Posted by Ministry at 18:53
| 90 words
18 February, 2005
Nosy neighbour tool
As reported by the Guardian, Nethouseprices searches publicly-accessible land registry data to report the selling prices of houses/flats anywhere in England & Wales. It's a free service which could be useful to potential buyers (and sellers, I suppose) investigating a specific property or neighbourhood, but as the Guardian says, it's also a gift to nosy neighbours.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 12:10
| 133 words
15 February, 2005
Live pipes
This strangely compulsive 'Grid Game' (Flash) [Updte 16/04/08: dead link removed.] is Link of the Day at User Friendly.
It's not a test of skill; one merely clicks on a circular tile in the grid and watches the result. The tile rotates. If either end of the curved line on the tile meets the line on an adjacent tile, that tile rotates too. The chain reaction proceeds until no lines meet. The number of interactions is counted; my 'best' was 1625. Visually, the chain reaction resembles the rules-based computer 'life' simulations of the 1980s, little clusters of activity migrating across the grid like bacteria across a petri dish.
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!
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Posted by Ministry at 10:34
| 315 words
19 January, 2005
Doesn't work for me
These people and dogs are allegedly the winners of an 'I Look Like My Dog' contest.
Am I the only cynic who doubts whether the humans and dogs had even met before the photo session? There's something too neat about it all, as if human models were chosen to match dog breeds. Of course, I further wonder whether the dogs and humans really are so similar - Photoshop allows subtle yet powerful changes.
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.
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Posted by Ministry at 09:04
| 139 words
12 January, 2005
Grubbiness
Oh, come on. You can't really expect to see the Ministry in all its glory on a filthy monitor. Please clean your screen immediately, using this free utility.
7 January, 2005
Place the State
I think I must have learned something subconsciously from the Tull Tour History. I don't know how else to explain the fact that I can identify the relative locations of the US states with 90% accuracy, with an average error of 21 miles.
I wonder how many US citizens could do the same for the countries of Europe. I wonder how many Brits could, for that matter....

Posted by Ministry at 09:13
| 68 words
5 January, 2005
S'gone
I think it's safe to (regretfully) say that Another Sarah has closed her blog.
If I ever need to close the Ministry (never!), I'll have to remember Sarah's sign-off page. It took me a moment to get it (say what you see...), then I realised it's perfect.
28 December, 2004
Time code
Minor curiosity: Scott Blake's Barcode Art site includes a barcode clock.
Looking at the javascript and html, it's really straightforward; I wonder why I hadn't thought of that, nor explored what else can be done with it.
Maybe I'll have a play with it... one day.
Scott also offers a braille clock. Er....
16 December, 2004
Digging to China
Everyone knows that if you dig down vertically from the UK, and somehow avoid the molten rock, you'll pop out in Australia.
Nope.
You'd better pack your water wings, in fact, as the point directly opposite us is south