Screenshot: A Weblog

I wish I could remember where I saw a link to this odd little jigsaw puzzle, but it is very cool. Especially once you scroll down and read the directions and realize you can rotate pieces as well as drag them around the board to fit them together. It is both cute and fun. If you like that type of little game, or enjoy "brain teaser" type puzzles, the site as a whole is worth a browse. A lot of the games are fairly old, but the Flash implementations are quite nice. The I/O Puzzle is also worth a look - I'm still trying to figure that one out...

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In between tackling chunks of the pile of work in front of me, I've been poking and dragging my way through the levels of Untangle. It's an insanely simple game - dots are connected with lines, and you drag the dots around until none of the lines cross. I am up to level 18 out of 20 and it is getting quite hard, but there is still something soothing about the combination of luck, logic, and trial-and-error that seems to work best for tackling the puzzles. Plus, it's a pretty game, if you ignore or hide the chat window in the sidebar that varies between inane and obscene. There is the corner of my brain that tells me I could get the same enjoyment - and actually accomplish something useful - by untangling some of my messier skeins of yarn, but I tell that corner of my brain to hush.

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An informal survey of two people suggests that this is more funny to women, but I am just dying with laughter over this dissection of a tampon ad, looking at the copy, typeface, and the fascinating background images. Make sure you read through the comments as well. For extra fun, try visiting the URL from the ad (www.upgrade-u.com) for even more surreal tampon fun.

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There seems to be an online aesthetic of crude stick figures and line drawings, at least in my regular visits - typical would be the strip xkcd or the RPG Kingdom of Loathing. While the sketches here are significantly more artistic, the Myst-style game daymare town has a similar feel - minimalist sketches of a seemingly deserted world scattered with puzzles and items to collect [via not martha]. I haven't played my way through the whole game (there doesn't seem to be a save option and I unfortunately closed my browser window before finishing it) but I'm definitely going to go back to it. The creator, Mateusz Skutnik seems to have a few other games as well as some comics linked through their site that I want to look at sometime soon.

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Tomb Chess is pretty fun - it's like chess, without all of the complicated rules, more randomness, and undead pieces. Basically, the board is a graveyard, and the pieces are "buried" until you decide to release one without knowing what type of piece it is - or even if it is your or your opponents'. There are no tricky moving rules - just left/right or up/down. With the simplicity and the randomness, you can't think too much, so it moves a lot faster - it truly is the internet version of chess....

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It's been a bit slow recently on the contentful updates, but X-Entertainment is holding a summer megaparty, meaning that Matt is going to post at least something every day between now and August 1. Which means, if you aren't an X-Entertainment reader, now's a fine time to check it out. The weblog is fun, but the mainstay is the articles, reviewing pop culture cruft such as sodas, snacks, old TV ads and movies, and of course lots of toys - scroll through the list of articles on the front page to get a taste.

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If you haven't already seen it, check out this video that counts down from 100 using clips from 100 different movies. [via Ghost in the Machine] There's not a lot to say except that it's very clever. I didn't think about it ahead of time, but as I was watching I was pleased that, where possible, famous scenes with numbers were used - of course 88 was the target speed of a time-traveling Delorean....

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Sometimes, you just have to jump on a meme, and the Imagini VisualDNA at least looks pretty cool, and the process of choosing photos is sort of fun. Here's mine:

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It's been making the rounds quickly, but if you haven't seen the Visual HTML Jokes pool over at flickr, it's worth a browse. Some are just puns, but others actually do a nice job illustrating what the tags do, like the header tag/skyline one. I could see a selection of these actually making for a nice presentation of html tags in a class....

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I'm loving the little Venn diagram humor sketched on index cards and posted over at Indexed. While it isn't really a Venn diagram, I'm a big fan of the entry specifying the conjunctions of the various deadly sins into more complex flaws. You should definitely browse the whole site, though! [via Boing Boing]

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Two fun gravity games just came my way... Via Clicked there is Cosmic Crush, in which you are a little planet wandering the universe, eating smaller bodies to grow up into a big planet. It's fun once you get into it, but a bit dull to start. Less boring, but a little more frustrating, is Spaced Penguin! [via T] in which you shoot a penguin towards its spaceship in the presence of various gravitational bodies and other less astronomically accurate phenomenon. Spaced Penguin has been around for a while, but I haven't seen its new cousin, Doom Funnel Chasers! before - it seems to be the exact same thing, but different....

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The year rolls to an end tonight, and most of the people I've talked to have very little exciting planned for this evening. So, whether you are looking for something to distract yourself while waiting to see how badly they manage to mis-time the ball drop or are looking ahead for distractions for tomorrow after festivities tonight, here are some fun things I've come across in the past day or two:

A total ad campaign, but Viking Movies challenges you to identify twenty movie titles based on scenes recreated using office supplies. I'm up to having 15 of the 20 correct, but I'm stuck on (from the left) the 8th, 9th, 13th, 14th, and 19th ones. If you get one of those, give me a hint! [via Clicked]

There are tons of "best X" lists floatinig around this time of year, but this list of 25 Really Addictive Flash Games is quite comprehensive and good. The Idiot Test is fun and worth a couple of rounds, I love games like Blueprint where you have to solve puzzles to reach goals (though none are as good as the original, Lemmings), and Stackopolis, where you have to rearrange blocks to match a pattern in a time limit, gets suprisingly challenging. [also via Clicked]

My current game addiction, though, is MotherLoad, in which you direct a mining vehicle under the surface of Mars, collecting minerals to sell to buy more fuel and upgrades to your ship. The graphics are adorable.

Want something hands-on to do to liven up your New Year's celebration? Make a Steam Candle, really a miniature steam engine powered by a tea light. Very cool!

Questionable Content is a funny and interestingly-plotted daily comic - I highly recommend going back to the start of the strip because there really is a coherent storyliine spanning its entire history, and the backstory is relevant. Also, you don't want to miss any of the Pintsize strips. [via T]

In closing, 2006 has seen a bit of a rebound in my weblogging, I think, and I'm hoping to carry that forward into 2007. To all of my friends out there who read, I hope 2007 brings you wonderful things and I'll be thinking of you all with love tonight.

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Via J, I've been wasting a lot of time browsing the Uncyclopedia - a communal wiki based encyclopedia dedicated to misinformation. I was originally pointed to the list of weapons that don't exist, but should (Radioactive Zombie Badger Launcher! Ninja-in-a-box!) and the accompanying list of weapons that exist, but shouldn't (Kool-Aid Man! Blue Screen of Death! Incredibly Hot Anime Girls!) and list of weapons that don't exist, and shouldn't (Automated Crotch Kicker! Punxsutawney Phil Stuffed With Dynamite!) But other favorites include How to Smell a Bit Like Fish, Blame Transfer Protocol, and proofs that if it's on the internet it must be true.

Oh - and You have two cows....

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Every year Matt over at X-Entertainment puts together a Advent Calendar based on the Playmobile toy advent calendar, plus he promises to post goodies in his weblog each day. If you haven't seen this before, you may want to read the History of X-E's Advent Calendar first, as this year's story picks up with the same running cast of characters.

If you have read along in the past, Knacks has a MySpace page!

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Wish you could type faster? There are tons of these typing games out there, but Word Shoot: Spell Fast or Die! is actually really well done [via Clicked]. As the game gets more difficult you can't succeed if you have to look at your hands, and unlike most of these games there is actually a liittle bit of strategy. Plus, the graphics are cute.

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Another internet list, but a pretty fun one at that: The 50 Worst Video Game Names Of All Time. The list is pretty good, made, of course, by the humor of the commentary attached to each entry. And the provision of the link to this awesome random word generator to make your own awful titles. The student game I've been playing recently that's name refers to non-Euclidean geometry would probably fall around number 27, right after "Ninja Hamster".

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For T, some Friday fun, because he's never seen it, and because I made a promise: How To Dance Properly, the silly videos that eventually led to the show with zefrank. Read the blurbs under the video - they make it funnier.

Bonus dance video: Evolution of Dance

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I love it - it's movie seating charts as a variation on traveling salesman. xkcd has become my favorite comic on the web.

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You're Amazon. You decide to branch into the on-line grocery sales business. It's still an Amazon store, so you show a photo, list product features, and, sure, you allow product reviews. And then, inevitably, people review your milk [via Boing Boing]. And your bananas. And your cucumbers.

By the way, don't ever have dinner over at Amazon - they think that baked "scooped out [cucumbers] halves with buttered break crumbs, top with parmesan cheese makes a great side dish".

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A new favorite is the geeky, surreal, math-and-linguistics-infused webcomic xkcd [via Boing Boing]. The two that made me laugh raucously were Stacy's Dad and Computational Linguistics (caution, bad language). However, I highly recommend paging through from the beginning. If you don't have the patience, some of my other favorites are Copyright, Fourier, Self-Reference, Hyphen, Geico, Hobby, Graduation, Pillow Talk, Wright Brothers, and
Centrifugal Force.

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The editing is a little bit shakey, but Star Trek vs. Star Wars is still good Friday fun [via Vidiotbox]. Of course, about half the geek community would prefer a version with Kirk - it certainly would end differently. We probably ought to start placing bets about which franchise will sic their lawyers on this first....

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In the latest installment of people doing crazy things for web traffic, we have The Monkey Chow Diaries in which a guy is in the process of trying to subsist on nothing but monkey chow, water, coffee and vodka for a week [via VidiotBox]. His videoclips sum up the story, but you should definitely check out his weblog as well, in which he answers more questions about his monkey chow experiment than in the videos.

Obviously, there's no way to tell if he's actually doing this or not, but it's pretty funny either way. Today is day 5, so get on over there before the big finale on Friday!

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While I've never really been as big a fan of Something Awful as some of my friends, their recent forum thread on what if movies ran in reverse is very funny. Maybe my favorite, just for its consiceness and plausibility is for Peter Pan: "Disturbing portrayal of a paradise island's descent into chaos as a crocodile regurgitates a pirate who then proceeds to wage increasingly ineffective war on a group of regressive children."

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It's amazing how the last day of classes feels like a Friday, regardless of what day of the week it falls on, and how many appointments I have scheduled for the following day. I think it's the general campus vibe that does it.

In that vein, I thought I'd do a random link collection - fodder for some late night study breaks.

First up, a student showed us this face locator tool from the Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition company during a class presentation today, and it is very cool. It works wonderfully with group photos even, though we found that it doesn't find faces well when they're hidden inside football helmets. Hint: use Google image search to find on-line images with faces (or without) and then give them to the tool. I tried it with this image and got some pretty interesting results.

The "critique" of Chemistry.com at PunkAssBlog.com is cracking me up, with its observations on the rigorous scientific methods being used to match people with each other.

The new weblog Vidiotbox is presenting a viral video of the day with commentary and has been amusing me.

I've also been reading the Girl Genius comic series, which has been published in book form but is also available from the start of the story on-line. Victorian evil geniuses with crazy robots rule!

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If you have ever enjoyed anything I have linked to, you will go listen to the song Code Monkey (just click on the "Code Monkey" link under the blurb). It is birlliant and true and funny and I am geeking out to this song in my office, to the dismay of the student who just came by to ask a question.

I actually aquired a code monkey of my own last summer (he is purple and plush and from Seattle, as many good code monkeys are), and perhaps I'll finally bring him in to the office with me tomorrow.

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I do not like personal April Fools Day pranks, but I do enjoy the inevitable internet hoaxes and website redesigns. I ran into a couple yesterday just surfing around, but it turns out that Wikipedia has an entry listing 2006 April Fool's hoaxes, including a link to a screenshot of my favorite (even though I feel a little guilty for finding it so funny). If you scroll to the bottom, you can find entries on the notable April Fool's hoaxes from the past six years as well.

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Here's an internet game that you can really only play online: What Did I Search For?. You're shown the Google results page for a one-word search, with all occurences of the search term omitted, and have to guess the search term. Yeah, you could cheat, type in the URL of a returned page, and find the elided term from the blurb, but that really misses the point. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but now I'm well hooked. And, as a bonus, as you keep playing you are "rewarded" with links to pretty pictures or, eventually, other games on the site - I just won the featured bonus game of Frogger!

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I'm feeling uninspired about posting, so I'll jump on a meme seen over at AAYOR: asking Google what I need. Google's top ten suggestions:

Amanda needs gnutar?
Amanda needs to be rebuilt.
Amanda needs to be loved.
Amanda needs a mom in her corner with lots of time and attention to give her.
Amanda needs a small config change.
Amanda needs X11?
Amanda needs her local food bank to put food on the table for herself and her daughter.
Amanda needs to know: Why?
Amanda needs new ones, STAT!
Amanda needs to be recompiled on landon.

I think Google is confusing me with the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, a unix utility for backing up machines over a network to a single tape destination. Though, I do miss X11.... Maybe the small config change would be enjoyable too!

Posted by Amanda at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes from laughing at the Hearsay Exception video, spoofing the Schoolhouse Rock video about interjections, and filmed using Lego characters. It's seriously the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in a long time.

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A friend pointed me to the cartoon Narbonic, whose archives are open for free this week, and suggested that I check it out starting from the beginning. I'm going to lose the rest of the afternoon to the archives. I knew I was hooked when I hit the week (probably a couple of months in) where the evil scientist Helen Narbon is being pursued by ANTONIO SMITH, FORENSIC LINGUIST for abuse of language in her manifesto. How can you resist a strip with lines like "11:33 AM, Eastern Standard. Once again I find myself scaling the face of a building, in pursuit of a mad scientist bent on world domination. And I've got the relevant text to prove it.", from Smith, or on the part of Narbon, "You never think you'll get a hero, and when you do the place is a mess. I'm going to scrub the toilet." Hee! Thanks for the pointer, E!

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I've been being entertained by the new-to-me Yirmumah! comic; this past week or so, the comic has involved fast food mascots, starting with the creepy, creepy Burger King king. A month or so back in the archives there was a long stretch of Star Wars themed comics as well, if you're a big geek into that type of thing. I loved the Save Greedo one :)

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I've been walking around with the song from the Kenya animation in my head all day, doing the lion dance while nobody is watching (I hope!), because it is funny and painfully catchy, and it's the last day of classes here, and it's finally sunny and warm. You must go check it out - it's at the same place as the "Badger, badger, badger" thing that was going around, but this is much better. [via Bitch. Ph.D.]

Addenedum: The link above hasn't been loading recently, so I found this alternate site with the Kenya animation.

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In looking for illustrations of busisness sites which do not represent eCommerce, in that no goods are being bought or sold, but which might still be considered commercial, I discovered that there are at least three rival pro-milk websites: got-milk.com and whymilk.com both employ the "Got Milk?" motif, though the former seems to target a younger audience and the later relies on a non-animated athletics theme, and moomilk.com seems to follow an educational theme, offering a "dynamic adventure into the dairy industry".

If that isn't enough nutritional fun for you, check out the food allergy apparel at Allergators. You can help protect your kids by buying them shirts with cartoon allegators proclaiming "I'm Allergic to NUTS" across their chest. Good news - they're available in adult sizes too!

Rounding out the bizarre, don't miss the Wired article Collar Cultivates Canine Cliques, describing the Social Networking in Fur (SNIF) project. Just put a wireless-enabled collar on your dog and track their social interactions. From the article:

"It would be helpful to know in advance if another dog is aggressive and if Bogart (my white shepherd) has had any problems with them in the past," says Marilyn Heywood Paige, a dog owner from Philadelphia. "I can see people setting up play dates for their dogs based on compatibility. If I know that Bogart has the most positive, active interaction with a particular dog, I would e-mail that owner and ask when they usually walk their dog and if we could arrange to meet at the park. That would be quite good, actually."

When in the docking station, the leash becomes a display device, alerting users to the status of their pet's social network. If a dog's buddy goes out for a walk, the leash will play the buddy's unique collar tone.

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A little bit like communal fridge poetry, Just Letters allows up to fifty users at a time drag colorful "magentic" letters around the screen. With the tagline, "Someone keeps stealing my letters...", there is a tension between writing out your message and having others take the letters you need to do so. It's the type of thing that is fun until you realize that even one or two immature people can ruin everyone's fun. The profanity is predictable, "I like ur moms" is dumb, but the people who band together to drag all of the letters into one pile so nobody else can see or use them are just tiring. *sigh* This is why we can't have nice things.... [via #!/usr/bin/girl]

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I don't know why there is a Java toy that lets you control a nuclear power plant simulation, and the instructions on how to use the controls are limited, but after some practice, I was able to consistently keep the place from melting down.

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Heh - What Should I Do If The Internet Goes Down?, a ten step helpful handbook. Also fun is this flash game where you attack aliens by blowing up jeeps at them. [via #!/usr/bin/girl]

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I always forget that Book of Ratings continues to update, which is great, because then I remember and I go back there and have a ton of entries to read. Which is particularly good when there is a three part rating of elements.

Aluminum
Science has delved into the very nucleus of this element, alloyed it and amalgamated it, but nonetheless is still unable to determine why aluminum is able to block all known forms of alien and governmental mind-controlling rays. Certainly it's a frustration to the CIA and the R'ylegh'ni, but I think it's a testimony to the resourcefulness of our nation's insane paranoid freaks that they've discovered so effective a defense. B

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Hee hee - it's the Worst Hockey Logos Ever!, topped off with the "Bakersfield Fog". You know, fog might not seem like such an impressive foe, but the local outdoor hockey rink has been coated in a thick layer of fog the past few weeks, what with the unseasonably warm, wet weather, and an inability to see the puck or other players approaching does put an interesting twist on the game. Be sure to click through to the last page to check out the Toledo Blades' "goalie being brained by a puck" logo.... [via Anita's LOL]

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Speaking of computer games - I do enjoy the "on-line and free" variety, and recently I've been playing Shockwave.com's recent offering: Crash. Navigate cars and trucks through increasingly congested intersections without letting them crash into each other. But, since smashing hapless vehicles into each other is actually the appealing part of the game, when you get a black car with a sckull on the hood, smash it into someone for bonus points! I love those little black cars....

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Even up north, it's a windy, rainy, stay-inside day. If you're warm and with power, have some nice mindless fun trying out the new cat herding game Cats over at Orisinal. [via PCJM] I also finally tried out the much cited Virtual Drug Dealer, which is the type of game therapists should use to diagnosis your personality. Are you the type who buys a little of everything? Or blows it all on one unit of DesignerZ when the price dips low and hopes to make a fortune on a one-time deal? Frankly, if it weren't for the fact that Use of Human Subject protections make it illegal, I'd suspect that most of the games on the internet were put out there by psychology grad students. Worse for us, they're probably put out there by marketing people....

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I loved rebuses as a kid. There are hundreds of them at Rozie's puzzle site, along with some other games and puzzles. The off-site Enigma Puzzle is a fun implementation of a one-level letter substitution code where you use letter swaps to resolve in on a decoding.

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Also via PCJM, nothing brightens up a lunch-break like The UNH! Project, assuming you don't choke yourself laughing. The project collects and comments on panels from comics featuring "gutteral moans". It's classic out-of-context humor, allowing observations like this from the first panel in the collection in which a henchwoman utters "UKH!" while being slapped with a book: "It's completely gratuitous; her butt has accidentally wandered into the perfect position for it to be hit with a book." Then there's my personal favorite from the collection...

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If you're one of the last people on the internet to have noticed that Brunching Shuttlecocks officially shut themselves down, you also might have been as slow as I was to notice that you can still read the best part of their site, the Ratings, at The Book of Ratings. I'll probably stop by the Self-Made Critic site occassionally, too, because I generally only read movie reviews after I've already seen the movie. This allows me to play the "were the women cute enough to warrant an extra star from Ebert" game, and to snort at lines like this from the Self-Made Critic's Matrix Reloaded review: "I'm not sure exactly when it happened, perhaps during the slow-motion montage featuring left-over footage from Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit video, but early on there was a point when it suddenly dawned on me that I was watching a bad movie."

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I like tessellations, I'm a fan of the Escher gradient tessellations, and I just love these Tessllating Animations. Check out the crouching black cat and the fish on the black backgound in particular. [via The View From Here]

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A crazy productive week "in real life", culminating in checking a major item off my to-do list but very little weblogging. Still, I think we should all celebrate by stopping by the Snoopydance page. Doo do do doo do do dooo dooo....

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I amused a friend of mine today with periodic e-mails of weird and wonderfulness on the web. Now y'all can enjoy too!

• Here's some happy silliness to start your day off right: Cats in Hats


• Whee - very cool scrap metal sculptures of science fiction robot and alien favorites. [via Boing Boing]


• If you've got Flash installed, go check out this Honda ad of an amazing "Rube Goldberg" machine.[via Dave Barry's Blog]


• I was pleased that I could place all but a handful of the countries on this map of the Middle East within off-by-one or two of their true location on the map, particularly considering the number of name changes since I officially learned geography in school. And it actually was a relatively entertaining way to get a refresher on exactly where everything falls in that part of the world.[via YTBN]


• Geek Origami: Make a Starship Enterprise out of a floppy disk.[via YTBN]


• Distributed computing, like the SETI@Home search for extraterrestrial life screensavers, are pretty cool. I just found another cool one under the suprising name "Seventeen or Bust". Yes, that's a "work safe" link, it's a distributed client for solving the Sierpinski Problem.


• How can you resist the cuteness that is a crocheted pegasus or unicorn?


• The Lord of the Peeps: The Fellowship of the Peep
  "Bilbo Baggins! You don't look a day nearer your sell-by date!"


• If this picto-history is accurate, the first video arcade game ever was awfully cute. I'd like one in sparkly hot pink for my living room!


• The collective consciousness tries to draw pictures. Given a grid of black and white squares, select the color of a single pink square to move the image towards the goal description. View the animations of how the grids evolve from initial random states to final "pictures".


• "Secret of UFO Propulsion: Ghosts!" [via Bifurcated Rivets]
  ""The only connection I can find between ghosts and UFOs is that occasionally a UFO case suggests that the craft, although physically present, turned itself invisible." And so, presumably, individual UFO crew members can also turn invisible. "Such invisible ufonauts may occasionally enter a human dwelling and explore it.