February 19, 2005
Shiny points
Jon Stewart on blogs, thanks to onegoodmove.
A photo diary of a day in the life of Tom Peters.
[Technorati tags:DailyShow TomPeters]
February 19, 2005
Jon Stewart on blogs, thanks to onegoodmove.
A photo diary of a day in the life of Tom Peters.
[Technorati tags:DailyShow TomPeters]
January 29, 2005
[Ring ring]
Me: Hello.
Her: Hello!
Me: Hello!
Her: How are you this morning?
Me: I’m fine. Who is this, please?
Her: It’s your mother-in-law.
Me: (Sputtering) Oh. Sorry! I didn’t recognize your voice. How are you?
Her: (Laughing) That’s ok…
Me: Wait, you’re calling on my business line.
Her: Is this John?
Me: Nope. (laughing) Now you feel the fool!
Her: (laughing) I’m sorry!
Me: No problem. And give John my best.
January 28, 2005
Hiroyuki Goto holds the record for reciting the value of pi. How many digits did he memorize? To win, you have to come within an order of magnitude. Prize: The satisfaction of know you guessed good.
Drag-select between the X’s to see the answer.
X ————In 1995, he recited over 42,000 digits. It took him 9 hours. ———— X
January 26, 2005
Rageboy discovers some found art (finds some discovered art?) on a site that sells stock images cheap.
January 23, 2005
Three hours later…
Big Bri has posted an eerie Boston snow-at-midnight photo. FreckleGirl shows what it means to dig out a car. And Trevor and his pals are just nuts :) (Thanks to Boston Online for the links.)
January 7, 2005
From Reuters (with a photo here):
NAIROBI (Reuters) – A 120-year-old giant tortoise living in a Kenyan sanctuary has become inseparable from a baby hippo rescued by game wardens, officials said on Thursday.
The year-old hippo calf christened Owen was rescued last month, suffering from dehydration after being separated from his herd in a river that drains into the Indian Ocean.
“When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,” Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters.
She said the hippo’s chances of survival in another herd were very slim, predicting that a dominant male would have killed him.
However, Owen’s relationship with the Aldabran tortoise named Mzee, Swahili for old man, may end soon. The sanctuary plans to place Owen with Cleo, a lonely female hippo.
My theory: The tortoise is desperately trying to get away…but no one can tell. [Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.]
January 3, 2005
Here’s the link. Not much more to say.
January 2, 2005
Steve Johnson writes about a friend who lost a Rhodes Scholarship because of his use of italics. (I may be overstating a little.) It reminds me of my friend who had applied for a faculty position and was waiting to be interviewed at the annual American Philosophical Association meeting. His application was full of his scholarly accomplisments and achievements, the articles he had published, the dissertation he had labored over to support his bold thesis about Nietzsche, and just a few lines about his personal interests. He was waiting in the hallway as the current interviewee departed, and heard a faculty committee ask, “Who’s the next one?”
Answer: “The saxophone player.”
December 28, 2004
Here is the package of nubbins for my Thinkpad — the little red eraser-thingies — IBM sent me, shown about actual size:
Here is the package it came in: The plastic bag, in a foamy bag, packed in a basket of shock-protective cardboard in a box about a foot square.
December 20, 2004
Here’s an odd idea. The Urban Eyes proposal by by Marcus Kirsch (UK) and Jussi Angesleva (Ireland) would feed pigeons tiny RFID transmitters embedded in bird seed. When a transmitting pigeon passed close enough to one of the CCTV cameras watching the streets, the camera would transmit a video image to the Urban Eyes server. You would then see how the city looked to a particular pigeon in the 12 hours between ingestion and excretion.
This won third prize in the Fused Space contest. The winning project proposed setting up light sticks on a small Swedish island; lights would be lit when people visited an online memorial for the dead. (I think.)
[Thanks to We Make Money Not Art for the info.]