Missing Missy
26b/6 or (26bslash6 if you will) has a lot of entertainment in for you if you have small troll inside. Not a really vicious one though – just a happy, sometimes cute, always funny, little troll that has become quite the internet celebrity ever since Simon’s Pie Charts hit the blogosphere a while back.
In that spirit, this just in:
Click the image or this link for the full story, which made me laugh out loud (which is seldomn, I usually make use of a clever snicker or a quiet “pheh”).
Thanks, Robin!
StoryCorps
From storycorps.org: StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
There’s a great deal of highly interesting material collected, and the importance of such a library cannot be measured or compared to anything. Some of the stories are very personal, and I sometimes find myself left with a sense of gratitude for being let in on the highlights of other people’s lives. This one here is a good example, it might make your eyes moist:
A world-wide version of StoryCorps would be beautiful.
The United States of Supercomputers
Without counting secret machines, this is the state of supercomputing in the world: The United States’ government, companies, and universities have more computing power than the rest of the world combined. Each square within each country represents one supercomputer. (gizmodo)
I already knew the basic outlines of these proportions, and can’t say I am surprised by the US’ dominance. I didn’t expect to see Switzerland up there though, nor Saudi. And where are the aussies?
via gizmodo
Jon Stewart: Appholes
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Appholes | ||||
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via BitsAndPieces
The internet in 1969
So that’s how it was supposed to be: the wife would use the internet for shopping, and the husband for paying bills. They’ve got multiple screens though, or “Windows” if you will. And the husband even has a tablet!
via BitsAndPieces
Internet choir sounds surprisingly good
This recording was done through the internet, with 185 people in front of their webcamera singing the same song (though not simultaneously, I imagine). Beautiful!
CodeOrgan creates webmusic
Enter a website address, and CodeOrgan plays the html body as music. Not my kind of music, perhaps, but interesting still. Makes me wonder what a website would look like if it was built to sound like something recognisable – like Lennon’s Imagine. Something to consider for the numerous fan sites online!
via Geekologie
PWN’D support group
I can’t say I’ve ever felt the need for such a support group myself, not because I’ve never been pwned in a game, but because I never cared much about being … OK OK OK SO I DO CARE! Why can’t you just kill me and leave me be?! Would it take much effort not to wink at me, “yoo-hoo!” or flame me e-v-e-r-y time you manage a sniper coward’s headshot waaaaaay up from behind a tree? Come join me on WoW, I’ll ROLEPLAY you to tears, you… you…
Past 30, I no longer have the nimble agility needed for fast-paced games. I see that now. So getting hit every now and then shouldn’t come as a surprise. Considering 80% of the players I face are below 17, I really shouldn’t get upset by childish remarks either. Still…
via Geekologie
The Copenhagen Wheel
Photo: SENSEable City Lab, MIT
Yesterday, at the COP15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen, MIT students presented the Copenhagen Wheel, a hybrid smart wheel that harnesses your kinetic energy created when braking and stores the energy in the wheel for later use. The wheel can communicate with your smart phone, which may tell you how fast you’re going, where you’re going and when you’re likely to get there. Having the smart phone mounted on the handlebars, you can lock or unlock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor should assist you. The Copenhagen Wheel also monitors pollution levels, and this information can be shared online, making for a map showing you and your fellow citizens where to go to avoid pollution and traffic congestion.
The Face Transformer
In my blog article “My clone looks nothing like me“, I present the thought of having your own look-alike somewhere in the world.
Today, I found this marvellous Face Transformer created and hosted by the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Here, using the transformer script, my friend Sigurd has been given west-asian, afro-caribean and east-asian features, suggesting what his look-alike looks like:
Photo: Vetle Skatvoldsmyr
The Face Transformer also has options to show how you might have looked like as a baby, child or teenager, and how you might look like as an old man (or woman). Also, you can feminise your features, see yourself as a Botticelli painting or even mix fifty percent chimp DNA into the gene pool. Good fun.
Resizing your photo aforehand to 640×480 is recommended, as large images will load slowly in the script (standard webcam size should be fine).
My clone looks nothing like me
Yesterday, my friend Richard from London told me he saw someone over there that looked a bit like me. It got me thinking.
The idea of having a twin is strange. Of course, with 7 billion people in the world, chances are there’s someone out there who resembles you so much that people could be fooled, should you bring your twin to your hometown. That is, before your twin starts talking, laughing, moving, gesturing, all those other things that makes you you to other people. But at a certain distance, in a certain light, standing upright without moving or talking, you probably should be able to fool your own parents (or HE would fool your parents, rather). Somewhere out there is a man (or a very ugly woman) who looks pretty much like me.
Today, I came across http://facialprofiler.com, which is an ad campaign for Coca Cola Zero (they want us to believe it’s standard Cola’s twin – utter nonsense of course, tastes nothing like it). At the site, your picture is taken via webcam, pictures on Facebook or pictures from your harddrive and then compared to other people’s faces in their database. And then you’re waiting in excitement as “People ahead of you in the queue” gets matched – and their match actually looks like them! If you try this procedure a few times though, you’ll see the “people ahead of you in queue” are the same people every time, so that’s just something they’ve put in there to have you believe this thing works.
Well, does it work? You be the judge:
First try. Using photo from harddrive.
Second try. Adding a smile as parameter.
