Things I’ve seen, heard, or was told by someone. Item in this category usually originate from the Internet.
The girl who I took to my prom senior year, Lia DiBiase, got married last Saturday (March 22). Not a huge deal since we weren’t dating or anything, but it’s still kind of weird, I feel.
In any event, congratulations to Lia and Adam!
See also: Prom Date Engaged
This is kind of interesting news:
A new study has found Bloggers are better adjusted and live healthier, happier social lives.
The research, from Swinburne University of Technology found that “people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog” after a two month blogging period when compared to people who do not blog.
If any one is interested in blogging, I recommend using WordPress.com. It’s an open-source, “state-of-the-art1 semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.”2. It’s a great system and I would use and recommend nothing else.
What does that mean any way: state-of-the art? ↩
I was playing catch-up with my RSS feeds when I stumbled upon this little gem from kottke: 21 accents in 2 minutes 30 seconds.
The women, Amy Walker, pretty much does exactly what the title would suggest: 21 accents in 2 minutes 30 seconds. No surprise there. Skip forward (or just wait, because the rest of her accents are actually pretty good) to 1:45 and you’ll get the Seattle accent.
Now, up until this time, I was never aware that Seattle had it’s own distinct accent. As it turns out, Seattle may. I found a 2005 article by the Seattle PI (that would be “Post-Intelligencer” for all you non-natives), Contrary to belief, local linguists say Northwest has distinctive dialect, that reports that “Jennifer Ingle, a 27-year-old Ballard native and student of language at the University of Washington” did a study on the Northwests’ distinct accent:
Say “caught” and “cot” out loud. If you’re a true Northwest speaker, the words will sound identical. Linguists call this the “low-back merger” because we’ve merged these two vowel sounds. On much of the East Coast, these same words will sound different. “Creaking is a way of making those distinctions that are being lost,” Wassink said. Just as Bostonians tend to compensate in their speech for removing the “r” from many words, she said, we might speak creaky to compensate for refusing to use both vowels.
The Space Needle is 184 meters tall. Despite its height, the center of gravity is only 1.5 meters about the ground.
The earthquake stability of the Space Needle was ensured when a hole was dug 30 feet (10 m) deep and 120 feet (40 m) across. An army of cement trucks (467 in all) took one full day to fill it up. In fact, the foundation alone weighs almost 6,000 tons and there are 250 tons of reinforcing steel in the base. With this concrete base weighing the same as the above-ground structure, the Needle’s center of gravity is just 5 feet (1.5 m) above ground level. The entire structure is bolted to the foundation with 72 bolts, each bolt being 30 feet (10 m) long.
After my entry two posts ago on Continuous Partial Attention and my ever so slight mention of Radio Lab1, David Bukszpan, the publicist for WNYC Radio, sent me an email:
I see you’re a Radio Lab fan. I also see you’re out in Seattle, so you won’t be able to make it, but wanted to let you know the Season 4 Premiere Listening takes place tomorrow (Thurs) at the Angelika Theater in NYC.
More info at www.radiolab.org & www.wnyc.org/events/93353, in case you have readers in NY you’d like to tell about it.
So I know that at least a few of you are in New York, so I thought I’d pass this along.
And in case that wasn’t enough, check out scientist tickles rat in flattering red lighting at the Angelika Film Blog.
Perhaps Jad Abumrad or Robert Krulwich will call2 me next.
Update: See also: http://hughmcguire.net/2008/02/20/radiolab-live/
1 It was a footnote mention that said, “See also”
2 My number is on the right column of the blog
Check out this picture:
Photo by Taryn Simon
Know what it is? Read more after the jump…
Read More »Minimalism at its Best
I just bought an external 1.5TB hard drive for $81.38 from Dell.
You heard me right, for $67.99 + $7.99 shipping and $5.40 in taxes I got my hands on a SimpleTech 1.5TB SimpleDrive Pro Duo USB 2.0/eSata External Drive (FP-UFE2/1.5TB).
That’s 5.4 cents per a gigabyte, which is crazy low!
Amazon says that they should going for closer to $600.
I think that someone at Dell made a typo and instead of typing in 679.99, they punched 67.999 (and the computer just truncated the last digit).
Get’em while they hot and not sold out:
Dell/SimpleTech 1.5TB external HDD
Thanks to Matt for finding the link on Slickdeals
The advertisements for ‘Untraceable’ are pretty exciting. Some sick schmuck kills his victims using a web site. The more people visit the site, the faster the victims die.
You may view “Untraceable,” as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn. Or you may stand back and see it as a cleverly conceived, slickly executed genre movie that ranks somewhere between “Seven” and the “Saw” movies in sadistic ingenuity.
Here’s my issue though: the concept is fatally flawed from the get go. In short, all our heroine needs to do is yank the DNS entry for the site and the game is over.
I might let something like this slip if technology were more accurately represented on a regular basis, but it’s not.
Matthew Inman has nice round up of the top 10, What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies):
10. Most code is not inherently cross platform
Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit!
If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.
