Have you ever wondered what exactly the difference is between the United Kingdom and Great Britain? Or how exactly does Wales fit in there? And what’s up with Northern Ireland? What you need is a helpful Venn Diagram. [via monkeytime]
The Royal Society is giving access to all their scholarly publications, from March 1665 to last year. Go search the archives. It’s free until the end of the year, but hopefully they will see the light and keep it open permanently. [via spurgeon]
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, today is Museum Day! Get in free at participating museums, like the ones in Georgia, for example. [via lh]
Spooky photos of an abandoned asylum. What is it about asylums (asyla?) that makes the creepiness just sort of stick around? The photos remind me a bit of Dave McKean’s work in Batman: Arkham Asylum. Not really for any visual similarity, but the atmosphere. The rest of the site has some other cool collections of […]
Gina Trapani compiled a year’s worth of the bi-weekly Geek to Live posts over at Lifehacker.
The Middlebury Institute for the Study of Separatism, Secession, and Self-Determination is hosting a secessionist convention in Vermont.
The New Yorker on truth, beauty, and string theory. Along similar lines, last month’s Wired featured a brief little interview with Lee Smolin, who just published The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. While we’re on the topic, take a look at the introduction […]
TMN recently finished up their series of briefs on metropolitan parks.
Radar surveys the 8 worst hair trends on Capitol Hill. The Rep. Tom Lantos/ Emperor Palpatine bit is quite perceptive.
NYT article about the Dummies series of books: “We don’t use future tense, we don’t use passive voice, we don’t have long chapters. A 26-page chapter is getting pretty long.” Well, at least check out the cartoon at the head of the article.
Here’s a very large Flickr photo group dedicated to HDR photography. Some of the photos are just spooky, better than real life in a Pixar meets National Geographic kind of way.
Michael Rogers questions the future value of reading: “It’s time to acknowledge that in a truly multimedia environment of 2025, most Americans don’t need to understand more than a hundred or so words at a time, and certainly will never read anything approaching the length of an old-fashioned book.”
Allsimps.com links to streaming video of all the Simpsons episodes. Has it really been 18 seasons already??
Now here is a great title for an essay:
“An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny, Shot from the Prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords, and All Other Usurpers and Tyrants Whatsoever; Wherein the Original, Rise, Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights, Freedoms and […]
Hmm. In its digital cameras, HP now offers a “slimming” feature to make people in photos appear thinner than in reality. What do you think? Harmless gadgetry? Symptom of cultural decay? Somewhere in between? [via df]
Perhaps you keep saying to yourself, “One day I’m going to read [insert classic novel from a bygone era]… but, um, not today.” If the book is in the public domain, DailyLit can make the task a bit easier by sending you a couple minutes worth of the story each day.
“Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text.” This looks really cool. I like that it consumes the screen to block out all the other software I use for procrastination.
Recently I switched over to using Notepad […]
Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go. This is the new 2007 edition that shows outlays in the discretionary budget–what Congress directly decides. Also check out the graphic that shows the general breakdown of the entire $2,800,000,000,000 budget, give or take a few pennies.
Word on the street is that Lipton has decided to make tea bags that contain full-leaf tea, which jives with Orwell’s instructions. Here is Lipton’s site for the new “pyramid” tea bags. I’m not sure how I feel about the fruity flavors… taste will tell. [thanks, rebekah]
Cato Institute has a new paper about Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism. Here’s the full report [PDF].
The NYT has a cool piece on rent in New York: “What we saw was a uniquely New York kind of mess.”
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change: “stop the story-centric worldview”. [via dashes]
Photos of Chernobyl, still a ghost town some 20 years after the nuclear reactor meltdown. I love seeing how the trees have grown in and reclaimed the land.
In light of William Chace’s recent article about what he would tell today’s college students, I really liked this article excerpted from his new book about the difficult, tangled roles and responsibilities of the college President:
New college and university presidents find that changes they want to make in the administrative structure are not accomplished easily […]
A couple articles about speechballoons in comics and their evolution. There is some great stuff in the archives as well.
The Mises Institute has gathered up some of the latest economic indicators for the United States. It ain’t looking good, folks.
The Music Animation Machine MIDI Player creates cool, simple, colorful visualizations for MIDI audio files. For examples of the output, see Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and or check out Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
From Psychology Today, research on given names and child development: “Parents may be further empowered to christen their children idiosyncratically given that names aren’t the rich source for taunts they once were. ‘Kids today are used to a variety of names, so it is almost too simple for them to make fun of each other […]
Sculptures made from incredibly intricate cuts on sheets of plain white paper. The snowballs were a personal fave. [via svn]
William Chace, current professor and former president of Emory University, has an odd little opinion piece in the New York Times. “When I was a college president, I was never able to give incoming freshmen the honest talk I wanted to. But had I done so, here’s what I would have said…” Bill, as I […]
Looks like some folks need to brush up on the whole “managing sensitive information” thing: a Google search for [confidential “do not distribute”].
Some good tips on breaking the omnipresent writer’s block, along with links to tips elsewhere: “Writer’s block is a sham. Anyone who wrote yesterday can write today, it’s just a question of if they can do it to their own satisfaction. It’s not the fear of writing that blocks people, it’s fear of not writing […]
Here’s a sweet photo of the moon. The colors are accurate, but the image was tweaked so that the colors are more saturated.
A cool collection of photos of books, almost like good portraiture. [via mefi]
A couple years back, I got interested in the ideas of voluntary simplicity and the downshifted lifestyle. My readings eventually sent me on a side-trail to the book Your Money or Your Life. Since then, about 14 months ago, I’ve been tracking every cent I spend on everything. Usually if I have any receipts when […]
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