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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Chainmaking

Boing Boing has a post with an animated GIF showing a machine making chain.

Google Street View on a Submarine

I have always like submarines and now Google Street View will let you take a tour of HMS Ocelot a submarine at the Chatham Historic Dockyard in the UK.

via Google Maps Mania

How Common is your Birthday?

The Daily Viz has a post with a heat map showing how common a particular birthday is (at least among people born in the US between 1973 and 1999).  July, August and September seem popular with September 16 being the most common.

The Great Sahara Sea

According to this article on IO9, in the 19th century there were plans to dig a canal from the Mediterranean to flood the low lying areas of the Sahara desert and create a giant inland sea.

The London Times said that the plan "dazzles the imagination, yet it has a sufficiently substantial basis to satisfy several shrewd traders in African commerce and some distinguished engineers." The Daily News called the project "the most remarkable that has ever been devised."

The Royal Navy in the First World War

The Guardian has an animation that shows the movement of the ships of the Royal Navy during the First World War.  The information comes from a project that is going through all of weather information in the ships' logs as part of a study on climate change.  I am assuming it doesn't include all RN ships but it doesn't really say.

500 New Fairy Tales Found

The Guardian reports that 500 new fairly tales have been found in an archive in Germany where they had been sleeping for 150 years.

For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch. However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe.

Animated Beer Labels

For some reason this guy makes animated gifs of beer labels.

Average Female Faces

FSToppers has a post about the average female face in various countries.  It is interesting that there are noticeable differences between the various European countries (and also between the South American ones).

Power on Tap

Low-Tech Magazine has a post explaining that before the spread of electricity people used to power household devices using the water pressure from their water taps.

Victorian Lockpickers

Slate has the story of Alfred C. Hobbs an American locksmith who shocked Victorian London by picking a supposedly unpickable lock.

A Map of History

Slate has an article about a "Histomap", published in 1931, that purports to show human history in chart form.

The 5-foot-long Histomap was sold for $1 and folded into a green cover, which featured endorsements from historians and reviewers. The chart was advertised as “clear, vivid, and shorn of elaboration,” while at the same time capable of “holding you enthralled” by presenting:

 the actual picture of the march of civilization, from the mud huts of the ancients thru the monarchistic glamour of the middle ages to the living panorama of life in present day America.

Names Are Becoming Less Common

The Economist reports (with graphs) that the names of newborns in the US are increasing not in the top 100 names.

In fact since the 1950s names have become less uniform across the board. Back then 76% of baby boys were given one of the 100 most popular names. Now the proportion is 43%.