Making Glasses from Scratch

The Knowledge has a post with a 15 minute video from How To Make Everything which details making a pair of glasses from scratch.

The Dutch Reach

Mental Floss has a post about the Dutch Reach which is a method of opening car doors with the far hand that reduces the possibility of "dooring" a passing cyclist.  It would probably be difficult to get existing drivers to change habits but I suppose new drivers could be trained to open doors this way from the beginning.

via Twitter

Mapping the Canadian Population

Google Maps Mania has an article linking to several maps of the results of the recent Canadian census.  Some of the results for downtown Toronto are very interesting.  One district might show a small (or large) decrease in population where an adjacent one might have doubled.

Chinese government influences Canadian Chinese-language newspapers

The New York Times has an article about how the Chinese government works to influence reporters and reporting at Chinese language newspapers in Canada.

via a friend

The myth of the volunteer kamikaze

The Economist has an article (actually a book review from 2006) that dispels the idea that Japanese pilots lined up to become kamikazes.

She reveals that the tokkotai (“special attack force”, which is how the kamikaze are referred to in Japan) had no volunteers when it was formed in October 1944. Instead, new recruits were either assigned by their superiors or forced to sign up using pressure tactics. No senior officer offered his life for this mission; instead the “volunteer” corps comprised newly enlisted boy-soldiers barely of age and student conscripts from the nation's top universities.

Video: Putting on a duvet cover

You wouldn't think there would be much room for advancement in the area of putting covers on duvets but here is a video showing the "burrito method" which seems to involve a lot less effort than how I've always done this before.

This strikes me as the sort of thing we should have leaned in math class while studying topology.

2016 - A good year

An article on Medium gives 99 Reasons Why 2016 Was a Good Year.

Ottawa tourism in 2017

There seems to have been a bit of a surge in interest in tourism to Ottawa recently.  Possibly related to Canada's 150th anniversary.  The New York Times made the news here with its article 36 Hours in Ottawa.  The Ottawa Citizen follows up with several places the NYT may have missed.

And on Medium we have A hipster weekend in Ottawa.

Perhaps it is worth a visit.

Play Lode Runner in your browser

Those of a similar age to me will be thrilled to learn that there is an HTML5 version of the classic game Lode Runner that you can play in your browser.  I spent many hours playing this game on my Apple ][.

via Kottke.org

TED: Kevin Kelly on the coming Industrial Revolution

An interesting 13 minute TED talk from Kevin Kelly basically about how AI and humans working in teams with AI are going to lead to another industrial revolution.  There's nothing really ground-breaking in the talk but it provides a nice overview.

via Boing Boing 

Axe redesign

Business Insider has an article about a redesign of the axe - or at least the type of axe used for splitting firewood.

Making a katana from scratch

Sploid (part of gizmodo) have a post with a video on making a samurai katana (based on the one in Kill Bill) from scratch - i.e. they start with iron ore.  Well worth the 18 minutes.

I had never heard of the traditional Japanese technique for lighting the forge where they pound a piece of iron with a hammer until it becomes red hot then use that to ignite a piece of paper.

Furoshiki: BYO Shopping Bag Japanese Style

No Tech magazine has a post about Furoshiki which is a traditional Japanese cloth that can be folded in different ways to hold bundles of various shapes and sizes.

First Org Chart

Slate has a post about, and with a picture of, the first org chart.  It was drawn in 1855 for an American railway.

The Cafe Where Everything is Free but Time

Business Insider has an article about a new cafe in London where you pay 5 cents (3 pence) per minute to be there but you can eat or drink whatever you want while you hang out.

Next time you're in London, you could walk into the Ziferblat cafe in the fashionable Shoreditch neighborhood and grab a coffee. Perhaps you might sit down on one of the comfortable armchairs, pull out your laptop and check your emails on the Wi-Fi network. Feeling a little hungry? There's some food in the cabinet; help yourself.
How much does all this cost? Well, if you spend, say, 45 minutes there, it will cost you £1.35 (approximately $2.20).

A visualisation of how long you have left

Boing Boing has a post with an extract from an article about a fellow who keeps a jar of coloured beads on his desk.  Each bead represents a day remaining in his life and each day he removes one from the jar.  The beads are colour-coded by decade.

New Technique for Maple Syrup Production

Apparently the new method is to cut the top off a sapling and then, essentially, suck out all the sap with a vacuum.

via Boing Boing

US Internal Migration

Vizynary has a post with an info-graphic that shows migration within the US (ie how many people move from one state to another).  A nice way to show a huge pile of data.

via Boing Boing

Chocolate for Nothing

When I was young I was always fascinated by those puzzles where you rearrange the pieces of a picture of, say leprechauns, and you somehow end up with more leprechauns than you started with.  Boing Boing has a post with a video demonstrating the same thing with a bar of chocolate.

Your Personal Centre of Geography

Geo Mid Point will calculate the geographic mid-point of all of the places you have lived.  Mine seems to be in Labrador near Winokapaa Lake (Lat: 53.214381, Long: -63.207506).
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