Sunday, May 30, 2010

Which Colour Means What Where

Information is Beautiful has a post with a very cool chart showing what various colours mean in various cultures.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

A Flat Piggy Bank

Make has a post (with pictures) of an amusing piggy bank. It basically sandwiches your coins between two panes of glass.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Lego: Radio Controlled Sailing


Love this little vignette especially the gun-smoke / cannonball.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Video: Dutch Marines Capture Pirates

This is the sort of thing that will probably become much more common in the future. It is combat footage of Dutch Marines storming a hijacked cargo ship and capturing the pirates. The video was taken by a helmet camera worn by one of the marines.

The commentary is in dutch but it is pretty easy to follow what is going on. I liked it when the fellow with the helmet cam slid down the rope from the helicopter.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Who puts an OED in a blue box?

Several strange things happened to me the other day. I got up early because the electrician came to fiddle around with the electrical outlet for our new stove. (It had been installed where it blocked the stove from being pushed all the way back.)

The first weird thing is that I went for a run at about 8 AM. I was amazed at the number of people who were out that early. I kept having to slow down or dodge around groups of school kids. It was also garbage / blue box day so I kept having to dodge around them on the sidewalk.

The second weird thing happened a few minutes into the run. I encountered a gaggle of school kids and a row of garbage cans while I was beside a large truck parked in the road. Because I couldn't pass I slowed down. As I did so, I glanced over at the blue box. Sitting on top of it was an Oxford English Dictionary.

I'm not talking about one of those largish books that you keep on your desk for essay writing. I'm talking about one of these (that's the best picture I could find). This is a two volume set that collects all the content from the full 20 volume OED. In order to accomplish this, each page has the contents of 9 pages from the full set. Because the print is so small, the box that holds the two volumes has a little drawer that holds a magnifying glass.

The magnifying glass was missing but then I guess no one would throw a magnifying glass in a blue box.