Mario of the Month for April found here.
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Top 100 April Fool's Hoaxes
Top 100 April Fool's hoaxes of all time including (my favorite) #7 Alabama state legislature (as a joke) said they where going to change the pi constant from 3.14159... to 3 because it would make more sense biblicaly. Photo found at April Fool's Cartoons
Monday, 30 March 2009
Microsoft Fail
I was just looking around at the Fail Blog when I came across this picture. Also, see 10 reasons to get a Mac.
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
Random.org
Ever wonder what lotto tickets to buy, who should go first or what a random image might look like? All those and many more questions can be answered at Random.org the place to go for randomness!
Sunday, 22 March 2009
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Friday, 6 March 2009
Bizarre Useless Facts
Ebizarre.com dedicates itself to crazy useless facts, example: Did you know...
Ironically, when doctors in Los Angeles, California went on strike in 1976, the daily number of deaths in the city dropped 18%. Photo here.
The Great Robot War Begins!
I can't really beat Gizmodo's post on this: "Scratch another one on the checklist for Humanity's ultimate self-destruction. A Warrior-Alpha drone from the US Army's Odin Task Force fired against enemy forces with no pilot." A drone is a robot; e.g. the plane not only has no pilot, it has nobody at all in it (hence no need for a window, as you can see). More on Gizmodo, although there seems to be a lot of debate there about whether this is really the first time a robot plane has fired a weapon in a real war.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
Perseverance
Failed in business, 1831
Defeated for legislature, 1832
Again failed in business, 1833
Elected to legislature, 1834
Defeated for Speaker, 1838
Defeated for elector, 1840
Defeated for Congress, 1843
Elected to Congress, 1846
Defeated for Congress, 1848
Defeated for Senate, 1855
Defeated for vice-president, 1858
Defeated for Senate, 1858
Elected President of the United States, 1860
Abraham Lincoln
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Ray Kurzweil's Charts on The Singularity
This site has all the charts from Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity Is Near', which is all about the significance of the fact that a lot of technological stuff grows (or shrinks) at logarithmic speeds: that means it takes the same amount of time to grow (or shrink) by the same percentage. For example, if computer memory is 10 times faster now that it was five years ago, in five more years it will be 10 times faster again, or 100 times faster than it was five years ago. If the computer memory speed was 1 unit at the beginning, it would grow by 9 units in the first five years (to be ten times faster) but it would grow by 90 units in the next five years (to be a hundred times faster). The rate of growth is constant, so the amount of growth increases continually.
The chart above is one of the only charts that is not shown with logarithm units; it shows that the time between technological advance decreases at a logarithmic rate. This means that changes that used to be spaced centuries apart will soon come to be spaced seconds apart. Yikes! You can see the linear version of the same chart here, where this rate of change looks like a straight line because of the logarithmic units.
The magically appearing square unit
Interesting puzzle: both figures above are made of identical components, yet they seem to have different areas. How could that be? Click the image for the answer.
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