Tuesday, August 24, 2004
This is a stupid flash game. Yes, another one. This time you have to catch the balled-up paper and throw it in the bin. As is the way of these things, it's great fun, I played it for ages, and I'm crap at it.
posted by Mark 3:46 AM
Apparently there have been complaints about the Official Starters at the Olympics taking too long.
posted by Mark 3:32 AM
Saturday, August 14, 2004
How to Fold a Shirt. Whoah.
posted by Mark 4:42 PM
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Food, glorious Food!
posted by Mark 7:14 PM
Here and here are two recent news stories that have made my blood boil. If it's not immediately clear why, stop by sometime and ask me about (a) government using drugs to control the population's thoughts, and (b) corporations using governments to try and protect their disappearing profits and failing business model (again, by attempting to modify the thoughts of their citizens).
[The first link is to a mirror of the original story, as it has since disappeared from The Independant's free site and is available to paid subscribers only.]
posted by Mark 6:43 PM
Build a better Bush. It'd be hard to build a worse one...
posted by Mark 6:07 PM
Wondering the other day about what was the fastest computer in the world, I went looking for answers and discovered that it is currently The Earth Simulator in Japan. I'd expected it to be fast and somewhat incomprehensible, but I had no idea it might be quite pretty too. The Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list where I found it has lamentably few links to pictures of the other superfast machines, but I did discover that the current 2nd place holder, Thunder, looks quite ominous. However, when trying to get a grasp on just how much faster these beasts are than the stuff us mere mortals get to play with, I failed miserably. I even went as far as spending an hour quizzing a friend of mine who regularly works on a similar system, only to end up settling for "they are so different in their design and operation that a sensible comparison isn't really do-able" as the closest thing to an answer. Damn. At least it explains why the great all-knowing internet hasn't got any information on comparisons I suppose. I'll just have to content myself with pondering the difference between the one CPU I have here and the five thousand, one hundred and twenty that make up the Earth Simulator. Wow.
posted by Mark 4:44 PM
A "degree confluence" is what you call it when the lines of longditude and latitude cross. There are literally thousands of them all over the world, and you are never further than 49 miles from one. The Degree Confluence Project aims to persuade someone to visit every single one and take photographs for the website, and since it started with one curious bloke and a GPS reciever in 1996 they have amassed 34,284 pictures from 3,316 confluences in 154 countries! That's a terrific collection of pictures from all around the world, all with a short article about the place and the visit when the shots were taken. An interesting site all in all, and I really enjoyed exploring the photos.
posted by Mark 4:13 PM
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Power-napping to the MAX, dude. Like, totally.
posted by Mark 4:24 AM
Magical Trevor! This is a flash animation, and you'll need sound. Be warned though, if you listen to it you may well be singing it under your breath for days. And days.
posted by Mark 4:20 AM
Google's little problem last week got me thinking about search engine monoculture, so I went looking for alternatives (well, I had to, really). Anyway, I stumbled across a brilliant page designed to help Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need. This is a fantastic idea, and very well implemented. It's everything you could want from such a page; simple, clean design stuffed to the rafters with useful links and a guide to using them effectively. Did I mention it's brilliant? I think you should bookmark this one, or you'll be coming back here looking for it one of these days, I promise.
posted by Mark 4:06 AM
Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Well, actually it's none of these, because it's a website that plays the classic Twenty Questions game. It's very impressive software and good clean fun. Not only that, but the more people who play it, the smarter it's guesses will get. I'm hoping to encourage enough of you to play the game that it achieves self-awareness around Christmas, and goes on to take over the world by, say, mid March.
posted by Mark 3:52 AM