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Category: fun (page 6 of 7)

Accents

24 May 2008 / / 5 Comments

Currently on heavy YouTube rotation is aspiring actress Amy Walker, presenting 21 accents in two and a half minutes.

Accents are interesting. It’s easy to draw a lot of inferences about people from their accent, even when you’re trying not to. Even linguists aren’t immune to some strange attitudes. There I was, enjoying the clip. Then she got to Seattle, and just for a moment in spite of myself, I caught myself thinking, “Well, that one was easy. She was just talking like a normal person there.” Which I know is silly, because everyone has an accent.

So, at what point did her accent seem least marked for you?

Oh, and if you want to play with accents, try Sound Comparisons out of the University of Edinburgh and the Speech Accent Archive courtesy of GMU.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

23 April 2008 / / 1 Comment

I’m a puzzle nerd from way back, so I got “Professor Layton and the Curious Village” for the DS the day it came out here. I’m enjoying it severely, in part because I can watch the children go through hours of torment. Ha, ha, son. Don’t give up — try the chocolate puzzle again!

And when you get one right, the Professor sometimes says (in a crisp accent), “Critical thinking is the key to success!” You know how I love that kind of talk.

But wouldn’t it be annoying to be in an actual town like that? Perhaps like this ‘Penny Arcade‘ cartoon.

Have you been high today?

13 April 2008 / / 1 Comment

Good old human brains. Always picking patterns out of noise. And if you have someone to prime you in a certain direction, then it’s easy to see what you expect to see.

Case in point: this fantastic (and hilarious) music video in Hindi. Once you’ve had the (mildly risqué) English suggested to you, it’s very difficult not to hear it.

After you’ve dried the tears of mirth from your eyes and forgotten the lyrics, try watching the original without the subtitles and notice how the English disappears.

Hip hooray! Fafblog is back.

2 April 2008 / / Comments Off on Hip hooray! Fafblog is back.

And just when we need them! All the gang are here, including Fafnir, Giblets, the Medium Lobster, and occasionally Evil Santa and Zombie Lincoln.

Here.

‘Get Off the Earth’ puzzle

8 March 2008 / / 2 Comments

Sam Loyd invented this enormously popular puzzle in 1898, and it’s one of my favourites. You’ll have to excuse the stereotyped artwork, though.

The puzzle shows some warriors around a globe. The inside circle is a separate piece of paper, attached at the center so that it can turn freely.

Behold the globe with 13 warriors.

But give the globe a turn…

and one warrior disappears.

What’s happening here? How does the thirteenth warrior disappear? And don’t say the Rapture.

If you want to print it out and try it yourself, you may want to use the very nice PDF available on this page.

Why we do what we do

12 February 2008 / / 3 Comments

This is what we’re working toward.


(Does anyone know where this comes from? I lol’d.)

Stellarium: coolest app in the solar system

21 January 2008 / / 3 Comments

I always wondered how I could find out what stars and planets were in the sky on any particular night. And now I’ve found Stellarium, a free application that shows you that very thing.

You can specify where you are and the date and time, and it’ll render the night sky in glorious Star-O-Vision.

Click for a larger image.
But there’s more. You can zoom in on objects, like planets or nebulae. Try speeding up time and watch Jupiter rotate.


Or you can go to other places and see what the sky looks like from there. Here’s how Saturn looks right now, if you’re standing on Mimas, one of its moons.


Here’s a fun one: try going back in time to the day you were born, and find out what sign the sun came up in. You may be surprised. (Bill Nye explains.)

Youngest Boy and I now spend part of our night sitting on the kerb with the laptop, looking for constellations.

Scrabulous lawsuit — we knew it couldn’t last.

16 January 2008 / / 12 Comments

Hasbro sues the makers of Scrabulous. On the plus side, you’ll never have a reason to use Facebook ever again!

I have to agree with this writer: Hasbro has missed an opportunity here. If they aren’t providing an online version of Scrabble, someone’s going to fill the void. All those users = pent-up demand. Figure it out.

Furthermore, I doubt that Scrabulous deterred many people from buying a real copy of the game. If anything, it made Scrabble bigger than ever. Hasbro ought to have employed the game designers, had a grerat version of Scrabble ready-made, and collected the ad revenue. Maybe even made extra features for paid subscribers. Now, who knows if they’ll shut it down like they did eScrabble, without providing an online alternative.

The games are still up for now — better finish them fast, or conveniently forget them if you’re losing.

Happy birthsecond!

14 December 2007 / / 3 Comments

I use Time and Date.com all the time for their time zone and calendar info. But I’ve just discovered their Birthday Calculator. When will you be one billlion seconds old? (At about age 32.)

I plan to have a party when I’m 15,000 days old — that’s June 8th next year. I suppose I should call it Nerdmas.

Do you find it sobering that we only get about 30,000 days of life, if we’re lucky?

Influence evolution now

1 October 2007 / / Comments Off on Influence evolution now

Does this picture look like a face to you? It’s been generated somewhat randomly, along with tons of others at Mutating Pictures. You decide how much it looks like a face, and the more facey ones get to produce more offspring.

It’s not really natural selection, but it is a good example of how randomness plus feedback can cause certain features to recur. It even works when the feedback is very vague — you’re not saying exactly what it is that’s more face-like, but the more facey ones survive anyway.

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