2 Spare Pics

So, funny! 2 Spare.com has many collections of hilarious photos like Just on Widows..., 12 Awful Car Mods, Awful Traffic and more.

Snubby Land

Snubby Land is a game site with minor mistakes. One of my favorite game is The World's Hardest Game fun but hard. Pictured left is the World Hardest Game Final Level.

World champs on-line

The University of Alberta GAMES computer science group lets you play a bunch of games online against their computer programs. However, be warned: their programs are very very good (in some cases world champions)! You will lose!

The Second Man-Machine Poker Competition

Last year, the University of Alberta's Poker Playing program, Polaris, was narrowly defeated by top human poker players. The re-match is about to begin! The way they set this up is very clever. The machine plays 500 hands against a human, while at the same time in another game, it plays against a different human with the hands flipped (so the computer gets the hands the other human got, and the human gets the hands the computer got). This is clever because it eliminates any element of luck: both humans and the computer play exactly the same hands against exactly the same hands. Will machine triumph over man? Tune in July 4-6, 2008.

Think Bush!

I'm sorry U.S. but why did you re-elect bush? There are many videos that tell you why not from YouTube (best to worst): Idiot?, Crazy Guy, Falies to answer an easy question, Smart? and Insults Blind Reporter.

Treasure Box

I really like this art game called "Treasure Box". Photo here.

Top Line Rider Tracks

We all know Line Rider now it's time I show you my top 3 tracks but there are so many you might not share my choices. #3 Monumental, #2 Remake Believe and #1 Dark Matter overall Techawg is by far the best line rider maker.

The five most unhealthy drinks

These drinks are BAD! The worst one- Baskin Robbins Large Heath Bar Shake, pictured here- has a full day's worth of calories (2130 kCal!).

One More Level

One more good flash game site "One More Level with one of the better flash games Flash Sonic. Photo here.

Google Sights

Wow! These guys found some amazing sights from google maps they have two sites: Google Sight Seeing and Not in the Book. Photo here.

Eye Maze Mini Games

A few of the eye maze (site) mini games: Applicate Ver.0 get the apple to the exit!, Meet In Ver.0 get all the family members together (easy) and Nano Grow 3 a grow of course. Find some good hints here. Image credit here.

Google translator

Google's translator is amazingly good! Try it out!

I put in one of my favorite short poems, 'This is just so say', by one of my favorite poets, William Carlos Williams, which was written in English like this:




"This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold"

Google gave me this:

"C'est juste-à-dire

J'ai mangé
les prunes
qui étaient en
la glacière

et qui
vous étiez probablement
économie
pour le petit-déjeuner

Pardonnez-moi
ils sont délicieux
si doux
et si froid"

It's not perfect. Using 'tu' insteads of 'vous' would obviously be better (but it is hard for a machine to figure that out);'ils sont délicieux' should be 'ils étaient délicieux'; and 'économie' is certainly wrong there, but all in all this looks like a good try to me, for a machine. You?

Polygons

Math is fun! Polygons are part of it. Ever wonder what a 100 sided polygon? Find out here and more here (bottom of page). Photo here.

Get Cracking

Sorry, this is sorta boring just a well made site talking about eggs called Get Cracking. Photo found here which is also a good site.

Mindboggling photo

This is an historic photo taken very recently: never let it be said that we don't live in interesting times! This is a photo of Phoenix as it was landing on Mars, taken by another man-made machine, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. How cool is it to photograph our own Mars landing?

Via: www.planetary.org who says: Credit: NASA / JPL / U. Arizona

Atheist Spirituality from Alan Watts

Maybe too long for today's Internet-disabled attention span at 9 minutes. Alan Watts is a religious philosopher I liked very much when I was young. This is a recent animation of some excerpts from his old talks. (There are many more Alan Watts vids on YouTube.)

Oddly enough, religious atheism was a theme in my life today- I heard about it independently three times by chance!

Cosmic Crush

Cosmic Crush is a fun game were you try to be the biggest planet (or sun) very similar to fish eat fish or fishy!. But Cosmic Crush is play with gravity! Photo here.

Top 10 Zoomers

Top 10 fastest cars can be found at many sites the MSN News one, Super Cars, Automo Blog, Gayot, V-Cars and a video. Photo here.

OLPC News

For all your One Laptop Per Child needs visit OLPC News and find out there is a newer version of the XO-1:(. Photo of the beta version of XO-2 found here with a great article about the cheat new laptop coming in 2010.

Extreme Sand Sculpting

Check'em out.
Via www.darkroastedblend.com

Ds Lite /Mac Air Ad

A few parodys: here, here, here and (the best one) here all funny and a list of more here. The true ad here.

Mario Rap

A simple Mario freestyle rap.

Passively Multiplayer Online Game

Play the Passively Multiplayer Online Game at pmog.com.

"This game allows you to leave traps or gifts on any web page. You can also take missions across the internet, discovering new content while leveling up."

People won't take free money

"Representatives from price comparison website, www.moneysupermarket.com wandered the streets [of London] wearing sandwich boards offering a free £5 note to anyone who asked. Despite encountering over 1800 people, only 28 passers by bothered to take advantage of the offer."


Via BoingBoing via http://arbroath.blogspot.com/ (which looks like a cool blog, by the way).

Will it Blend? Nintendo.

A Wii Remote up here and a Mario Kart Wheel here.

Garfield Minus Garfield

Follow up to (and linked from) the post below: This guy posts Garfield strips that are unchanged except that Garfield has been removed. The result is an eerily insane strip, apparently about a normal man named Jon who has lost his mind. (Jim Davis, the guy who draws the real Garfield strip, doesn't mind.)

Infinite Garfield strips

Markov chaining is a way of putting together words that matches the probability they would go together in real life. For example, it is a good bet that the words 'I love' will be followed by 'you' (especially when said by me in your presence), even though they could, in theory, be followed by 'elephant poo'(?!). This site uses Markov chaining to generate all-new Garfield strips. Cool idea.

My nonsense-generating program, JanusNode (available from JanusNode.com) also uses Markov chaining.

Biggest Drawing In World (Fake)

It would have been cool... Official website here. Made on a GPS. Many other people had this idea gallerys here and here.

N Game

Wow! You must play this game if you haven't already it's just called N. It is so good in fact that Metanet Software Inc. made a video game of it simply called N+. Photo here.

Cost per gigFlOPS: REALLY cheap now!

I love this table (adapted from Wikipedia) on how the cost per gigaFLOPS has changed in the last 50 years or so:

Hardware costs:

* 1961: about US$1,100,000,000,000 ($1.1 trillion) per GFLOPS
* 1997: about US$30,000 per GFLOPS
* 2000, April: $1,000 per GFLOPS
* 2000, May: $640 per GFLOPS
* 2003, August: $82 per GFLOPS
* 2006, February: about $1 per GFLOPS
* 2007, March: about $0.42 per GFLOPS
* 2007, October: about $0.20 per GFLOPS (in a Sony PS3 console).

Imagine: we pay twenty cents today for something that cost over a trillion dollars around the time I was born! Now that's a bargain!

Petaflop barrier soon to go down?

Computer speeds are often measured in 'FlOPS' = floating point operations per second, essentially a measure of how many calculations the machine can do in a second (skipping over some technical details). A megaFlOPS is about one million floating-point operations per second. A gigaFlOPS is one thousand times faster (actually, 1024 times faster = 2 to the 10th power), or (roughly) one billion floating-point operations per second. Most desktop PCs can do a few (< 50) gigaFlOPs now. A teraFlOPS is one thousand (1024) times faster: roughly one trillion floating-point operations per second. Only a few machines in the world can do a teraFlOPS. Now IBM says their RoadRunner computer (pictured above) will soon bust through the petaFlOPS barrier, which is again 1024 times faster, or 1024 trillion FlOPS. You could play some cool video games on that baby.

Via: dvice.com

Ambigrams

Whem I was young I used to spend hours making ambigrams: words that can be read (either as the same word, or two different words) whether they are upside down or right way up. Above is an ambigram of the word 'ambigram'. The contemporary master of this difficult art (and related graphical arts) is Scott Kim.

New rulers

Convert plain old arbitrary units of measurement into sensible real-world units like 'cans of baked beans', 'Mount Everests', or 'hydrogen atom diameters' at http://www.sensibleunits.com/.

M of the M

Mario of the month. Via: Boing Boing.

GameBoy Platform Shoes

Although I suspect they are just a joke, these GameBoy platform shoes come from Japan- where else?! More here.

Via BoingBoing Gadgets via www.syberpunk.com

Kids Problems

I like that one and I was asked to be in this video!

The Top Game Sites

My top flash gaming sites this year: Addicting Games and of course Armor Games and Nitrome. Photo here.

PuzzPinball

Quite a good game where you must complete the pinball level by adding pieces. Play it here. Photo and walkthrough here.