God it’s been ages. Happy to be back?
Category: miscellania
Doomed relationship Gantt chart
More unconventional charts and graphics at Lunchbreath’s Flickr-stream.
Is this safe?
Are you sure this is safe?
And why are these people laughing? Well, because they are…
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You awake as a hamburger
A Cuil is a unit of measurement:
One Cuil = One level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation.
Example: You ask me for a Hamburger.
1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.
2 Cuils: If you asked me for a hamburger, but it turns out I don’t really exist. Where I was originally standing, a picture of a hamburger rests on the ground.
3 Cuils: You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.
Heat maps of the world, according to press coverage
A heat map of the world, according to the press coverage they receive in a number of well-established publications. Above is the Guardian; similar maps were made for The Economist, the New York Times and several other newspapers.
Alice in Wonderland
Artist unknown
Romanian McDrive
From a set of pictures of Romania… ouch.
Bag thief…
This bag thief is in for a surprise…
Not always right
notalwaysright.com contains “a collection of quotes from these particularly memorable customers”… like this one:
Me: “Thank you for calling [costume store], how may I help you?”
Customer: “Hi, do you guys have costumes?”
Me: *sarcastically* “No, I’m afraid we’re a tax accounting service.”
Customer: “Oh. Can I write off a costume rental on my taxes?”
or this gem
Me: “Welcome to Tech Support, you’re talking to ****”
Customer: “Hi, my name is ****, and I work at **** bank. You’ve really gotta help me! I’ve got this message on my computer, and I don’t know what to do!”
Me: “Okay, if you could start by reading the message to me, I’ll see what we can do.”
Customer: “Oh, okay.. It says: ‘Your computer has been automatically adjusted for daylight savings time.’ What do i do?!”
Me: “Er…is there a button that says ‘OK’?”
Customer: “Yes.”
Me: “Can you tell me what happens when you click the ‘OK’ button?”
Customer: “Oh, thank you very much! You’re a life saver! Thank you, thank you; now I can finally get these reports done!!” *hangs up*
Me: “…you’re welcome?”
Mentor: *after listening in* “You know what the scary part is? That is my contact at the bank… the same person I entrust my life savings to.”
Ok, just one more 🙂
Customer: “What time do you guys close?”
Me: “Nine.”
Customer: “… o’clock?”
Me: ”No… feet. Nine feet.”
Frozen soap bubbles
When you blow soap bubbles at minus 20°C, they will freeze before they hit the ground. In the following picture, only the top half of the bubble is frozen.
Full set of pictures, including pictures of a frozen soap bubble hitting the ground…
East vs West
I really like these illustrations by Chinese artist Yang Liu, who was born in China but schooled in Germany. They illustrate the differences between East and West.
“opinion”:
The complete set:
The Atlas of True Names
The Atlas of True Names is a map of the world where each city or geographical entity is labeled with the ‘true’ meaning of their name. The result is astonishing:
Maps of Asia and the Americas after the jump:
Why are these people in my LinkedIn network?
So I know people who have friends that met Barack Obama? Cool.
Simple steam engine
Behold, the world’s simplest steam engine.
Via Neatorama.
Rain machine
Look at this fantastic contraption on a house in Dresden, Germany. It plays music when it rains, and reminds me of The Incredible Machine.
Fancy Rubik’s cube
Rubitone is a Rubik’s cube with Pantone colors. It’s brilliant – but not for sale.
Building a life-sized dinosaur
From the show “Walking with Dinosaurs – The live experience” – which unfortunately hasn’t toured Europe yet.
Superman
🙂
Places I’ve been
You can make one yourself here.
Old Europe beats the hell out of USA, China at Olympics, no one notices
In the overall medal standings at the Beijing 2008 Olympics, Old Europe has beaten the crap out of both China and the US – winning almost twice as much gold as the United States, and more than double the amount of medals of China. Despite the heated debate about exactly this subject, no one seems to notice.
Old Europe, an informal name for the European Union before its recent enlargements, managed to obtain 64 gold medals, 68 silver medals and 70 bronze medals – a total of 202 medals, solidly claiming the first place in the overall medal standings.
The 12 countries involved (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Great Britain, Denmark, Greece, Portugal and Spain) have a total population of 366 million people, somewhat more than the United States, but far less than China.
So it seems Europe came out on top in this Olympics. But please, continue to ignore the elephant in the room. It’s not as if we have the largest economy in the world, or six times the fire power of China.
Word plays
Woordkaas has some clever word plays… in Dutch.
Jetsons car
I found this fantastic site about the Peel microcar, originally built in the early sixties. It looks like it’s straight from the Jetsons.
Guinness book of Computer Games
You can view the Guinness book of Records – Gamer’s Edition online, for free.
Fly like a bird
With a wing suit you can fly like a bird. Amazing.
The prejudice map
What do you get when you google for “people in _____ (some country) are known for”? The Prejudice Map ofcourse! Wonderful idea. Because I couldn’t get the original site to work, I took the liberty of reproducing it here 🙂
Click to view full.
Histomap of world history
I think I would like to have this map of world history:
“Not a map really, but a 5-foot-high chart showing in one glance 4,000 years of human history on a global scale. Thirty years ago I saw this on the wall of someone’s dorm room and it flipped me out then, and every time I’ve seen it since. Its beauty is how Mr. Sparks divies up world power (somewhat crudely) into its main factions graphed in each increment of fifty years since 2000 B.C.E. Different civilizations are color-coded so one can easily trace the flow and ebb of culture over the centuries.”
Unfortunately, it is out of sale – but luckily there’s still a high quality mirror online.
Ridiculous Amazon customer reviews
The customer reviews at Amazon’s product page for uranium ore (wtf??) are delightfully ridiculous:
Reviewer:
I ordered a bunch of cans of this, and still couldn’t get my time machine to work. I can’t wait to get back to 1985 and my hot girlfriend. Meanwhile, I’m stuck working at the Cafe 80s, dammit.
Response:
Time Machines run on Plutonium not Uranium. thats just silly.
Response 2:
You probably connected the Neirmann capacitors wrong on your flux capacitor. They should contact just a few centimeters above the Stendrand coils, but still below the containment field for the fusion material. Uranium ought to work as well as plutonium, the fission material is for collection of free quarks, not any sort of classical power generation.
Bring bad design to justice
Design Police is an effort to bring bad design to justice. I like their “Visual Enforcement Kit“.
Wigs for cats
I have two cats myself (conveniently called Kat and Poes, which is Dutch for Cat and Pussy), but I would never be so silly to dress them up with wigs – but apparently some people do.
The naming of continents
So how does a continent get a name? Apparently, America was named after Amerigo Vespucci by a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller. Europe was named by the Greek, or the Phoenicians – depending on who you ask. Asia seems to stem from the land of sunrise, and Australia has Latin roots. Interesting.
The history of Santa Claus
Christmas today is a combination of Yule (or Winter Solstice) and Sinterklaas, with a hint of Christianity.
This web site explains how the American revolution contributed to the adoption of the Dutch Sinterklaas holidays to the all-American Santa Claus. The image depicts Santa Claus, circa 1862. Hasn’t aged a day 🙂
The Internet is for…
. Of course, this is completely untrue 🙂
Formal apology
I kind of like this form I found. Nice indeed 🙂