Damn Interesting had a well-written look at the mysterious Toynbee plaques/tiles, In 1992, a chap in Philadelphia by the name of Bill O’Neill starting noticing strange tiles randomly embedded in local roads. They were generally about the size of a license plate, and each had some variation of the same strange message: “TOYNBEE IDEA IN…
July, 2006
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In another case of everything-on-the-Internet-must-be-true, the widely-read Boing! Boing! is helping to publicize false health information from, of all places, the unreliable Erowid site which seems to promote, if not advocate, the use of psychoactive drugs. The idiots at the Center for Science in the Public Interest are on one of their anti-caffeine binges and…
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Unfortunately, the actual speed that warp speed represents depends on whether you’re watching The Original Series or the knockoffs. In TOS, Warp 5 is 125 times the speed of light, compared tot he later series where it is 215 times the speed of light. There is nice chart and explanation of warp speeds in the…
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Sgt. Patrick Stewart, 34, was killed in Afghanistan last September when his helicopter came under enemy fire. His widow and family are in a dispute with the Department of Veteran Affairs over the religious symbol on his grave. Specifically, Stewart was a Wiccan and the Department of Veteran Affairs doesn’t have an approved symbol for…
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At his excellent TeleRead.Org blog, David Rothman tackles has an intriguing look at initial attempts to create annotation standards for e-books, web sites and other electronic documents. One existing initiative trying to move toward open standards for annotation of web documents is the W3C’s Annotea project where “annotations are stored externally in annotation servers and…
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Back when FireFox 1.0 was release I complained that the developers had eliminated one of my favorite features — statistics in the status bar that would tell you, among other things, how long it took for the page you were visiting to load. It was removed supposedly because normal users don’t care about that sort…
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As part of his American Ethnic Geography courser, Valparaiso professor Jon Kilpinen has posted a gallery of maps that show how religious belief/church membership is distributed across the United States. The data is taken from the Glenmary Research Center’s Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000.
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A most excellent Lego Crossbow that can fire lego bricks about 20 feet. For those times when Nerf guns just won’t cut it.
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I can’t believe I’d never run into this before, but I was browsing at a bookstore the other day when I ran across Planet X which — and I’m not making this up — is a Star Trek: The Next Generation and X-Men Crossover. From the Amazon.Com description, On the planet Xhaldia, ordinary men and…
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The other day I read Mark Pilgrim’s look at the problems with backing up large amounts of data. Mark wrote, But it’s not enough. I’m creating a lot of data, and I want to keep most of it for the rest of my life. This includes video of my children growing up, but also things…