Quiz: 100 Commonest English Words

Codebox Software has a quiz that lets you find out how many of the 100 commonest English words you can list in 5 minutes.

I got 44 in case anyone needs a goal.

via Kottke.org

Factoid: Eating Out

The average Canadian household spends 24.4 per cent of its total food dollar on food service, compared to 41.4 per cent for U.S. households.

I'm not exactly sure what this means or why the difference is so large.

This is from an article, which is worth reading on its own, about an experiment that shows that people will spend more money in a restaurant if the menus don't have dollar signs on them.

Don't talk to the police

Security guru Bruce Schneier has a post that links to this video of Professor James Duane of the Regent University School of Law explaining why you should never talk to the police. While I'm not sure how relevant the advice is under Canadian law, it does seem to make sense. Once the police are interested in you as a suspect there really isn't anything that you can say to change there minds.

The problem is that Professor Duane doesn't really explain what to do when you aren't a suspect. I don't think that he's really suggesting that witnesses shouldn't talk to the police but he should have made that clear. The problem of course is that you can start out as a witness and end up as a suspect and I would imagine that the transition between them isn't very clear.

Another video shows the second part of the lecture and features a police officer discussing, and essentially agreeing with, the points made by the Professor.

Follow up: John has also blogged about this.

Target Panic

The New York Times has an article about target panic. This is a condition suffered by champion archers which prevents them from aiming at a target.

via kottke.org

Mile High Showers

The Telegraph reports that certain models of the new Airbus A380 will have showers in first class.

Such luxury is reserved for the 14 people in the first class cabin, who will have access to the two showers during the trip.

The passengers will book their 25-minutes slots, which will include five minutes in the shower itself and some extra time to dry themselves off and get dressed again.

Follow up: Here's a blog post with pictures from a tour of the plane, including some of the shower.

Spacestation crosses the sun

Astronomy Picture of the Day has a great photo of the International Space Station silhouetted against the sun.

Torpedo Video

The blog The Stupid Shall be Punished has a post with a video of a retired American warship being sunk by a torpedo fired from an Australian submarine.

Calendar Desktop Wallpaper

An interesting idea from Smashing Magazine, fancy desktop wall paper with a built in calendar. I've never been a big fan of desktop wallpaper - I usually leave the one the comes with the machine - but these are interesting in that they each (well most of them) have a calendar of the month somewhere in the image. Plus they come out with new ones every month.