Crispian Jago presents the history of science as a subway map (cool visualization).
The comic strip The Oatmeal tackles the irony of mobile app pricing. Or, in the worlds of “Weird Al” Yankovic: “I hate to waste a buck ninety-nine.”
A 19th-century terraforming experiment: Ascension Island’s artificial ecosystem, instigated by Charles Darwin.
Fake Science diagrams the Types of Plugs. I’m going to have to hang on to this one for the “shameless” variety.
Nmap has a nice visualization of the Internet’s top websites: Icons of the Web
Leverage has put up a set of short video clips from their Comic-Con presentation. Let’s go steal a Comic-Con. (Interestingly enough, they picked some of the same bits I did for my own write-up of the event.)
Hilarious. People working on viruses are actually sending their crash reports to Microsoft — including the malicious code!
The Bad Astronomer presents: Top 5 Ways the Universe Could Wipe Out Humankind. He goes into these threats (some likely, some unlikely, and some certain — but not for millions of years) in a lot more detail in his book, Death from the Skies!, which is a fascinating read.
A couple of days ago I clicked on the StumbleUpon toolbar and landed on this incredible photo of lenticular clouds over Mt. Rainer at APOD. It was a bit unnerving, because that picture has been my desktop wallpaper for the past year or so! Good call, though.
The Straight Dope experiments with Kahlua cupcakes to determine two questions: How much alcohol is left in each cupcake? (Not much) Can you get drunk? (Not unless you eat so many cupcakes that you’ll be sick anyway.)
Windows 7 is doing what Vista couldn’t: convincing people to replace Windows XP. The best quote in this ZDNet article: “Windows 7 is the Anti-Vista.”
Some recent linkblogging. (Thank you, StumbleUpon)
NPR has an article on The Great Typo Hunt: Two friends cross the country with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs. And there’s a book.
I may need this.
When I was in college in the mid-1990s, I kept a “Bent Offerings” newspaper cartoon on my bulletin board. One person was scrawling “I before E…” on a wall. Another was correcting a menu, muttering, “It’s Brussels Sprouts, not Brussel Sprouts!”. A third was examining someone’s T-shirt, disapprovingly asking, “Is that how they taught you to use an apostrophe?” The strip was captioned, “Roving Gangs of Rogue Proofreaders.”
The appeal hasn’t stopped. You may have noticed I have two categories on this blog devoted to weird/funny signs and mistakes in signs.
Yeah, this sounds like a good bet. Update: I finally read it.
