An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
Posted in miscellaneous on Dec 11th, 2008
From The Japan Times: Japan’s master of an ancient Muslim art.
For Kouichi Honda, writing a beautiful line is what life is about. Getting every detail right — the subtle curves, the varying thicknesses and the density of the ink — matters to him as much as life itself.
The 61-year-old professor of international relations at Daito [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Nov 13th, 2008
From The Times Online: 8,000 Beduin stake their claim as the lost tribe of Barack Obama.
He has a host of relatives in exotic locations from Hawaii to Kenya, and during his run for the American presidency he discovered that he had an aunt living in Boston.
Now Barack Obama is being claimed by not one but [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Oct 21st, 2008
From typogrphy.com: Atoms & Aldus.
Last week I mentioned the atomic pen, which scientists used to construct some awfully tiny letters one atom at a time. These are small letters indeed: measuring two nanometers in height, they’re about 1/40000 the thickness of a human hair, which surely gives their inventor sufficient authority to issue the casual [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Sep 2nd, 2008
Here’s a bit from Tony Woodlief’s article, Why Some Kids Aren’t Heading to School Today.
We decided when we got married that our home would be better than what we knew as children. The foundation is love, order, and relentless application of rules like: Eat all your vegetables, and Mind your manners, and Don’t push your [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Sep 1st, 2008
How would you select a few interns if you had lots and lots of applicants? Seth Godin blogged about his approach.
Unable to just pick a PDF or two, I invited the applicants to join a Facebook group I had set up. Then I let them meet each other and hang out online.
It was absolutely [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Feb 15th, 2008
From physorg: The Best Way to Board a Plane.
"I remember waiting in line to scan my ticket inside the terminal, I believe it was at the Seattle airport," Steffen told PhysOrg.com. "I remember being quite disappointed when I saw how long the second line was — the one at the entrance to the airplane — [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Feb 2nd, 2008
From The kotatsu: a different way of thinking about tables.
The kotatsu looks rather like a coffee table and is comprised of four parts: 1) the wooden structure, 2) a heating element that hangs in the center of the structure, 3) a heavy futon blanket, and 4) a tabletop that sandwiches the blanket between itself and [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Feb 2nd, 2008
From the BBC: Penniless India trek is under way.
A man has started a two-and-a-half year walk from Bristol to India without any money – to show his faith in humanity.
Equipped with only a few T-shirts, a bandage and spare sandals, former dotcom businessman Mark Boyle is set to cross Europe and the Middle East.
On his [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Dec 12th, 2007
From the Telegraph: Michael Schumacher drives taxi in airport dash.
It seems that you can take Michael Schumacher out of racing, but you can’t take racing out of Michael Schumacher.
The seven-time Formula One world champion took over from his taxi driver in order to make it to the airport in time for a flight, it has [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Nov 27th, 2007
From the Guardian: Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock.
It is one of Paris’s most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.
But it is unlikely that the Panthéon, or any other building in France’s capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Oct 11th, 2007
From the Guardian: ‘We said to them, ‘Come closer’ but they said to us, ‘Go further back”.
"First just one came out, then two, then three, four, five, six, seven, but there were more than that in total. We had a dozen machetes, a dozen knives and some axes and pots with us. We gave these [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Sep 10th, 2007
From the Independent: Strange island: Pacific tribesmen come to study Britain.
In March this year, a British TV company invited a small tribe called the Kastam, from the tiny South Pacific island of Tanna, to send a delegation to England, a country none of its people had ever visited before. They spent a month living here, [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Aug 4th, 2007
From csmonitor.com: Uncertain future looms for ancient Thai silk.
Deep in the steamy thicket of low-rise wooden houses of this city’s Ban Khrua Muslim quarter, the din of teak hand looms thudding and clacking fills the air. Here in the canal-side workshop of Nipon Manuthas, three women surrounded by the kaleidoscope of vibrantly dyed silk spools [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Jul 29th, 2007
From the Beeb: Simpsons win over Kenyan carvers.
A group of carvers in western Kenya are looking forward to the first Simpsons movie hitting big screens around the world, even though they are unlikely to see it.
Although most of them in the remote village of Tabaka in Kisii have never watched the animated TV show, Homer, [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Jul 24th, 2007
From the Boston Globe: Leave those kids alone.
What could be more natural than a mother down on the rec-room floor, playing with her 3-year-old amid puzzles, finger-puppets, and Thomas the Tank Engine trains? Look — now she’s conducting a conversation between a stuffed shark and Nemo, the Pixar clown fish! Giggles all around. Not to [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Jun 27th, 2007
From the Guardian: The sheer hell of bossy Britain.
Last month, the public address system at Earl’s Court tube station in London was served with a noise abatement order. Passengers, it seems, had had enough of being told the blindingly obvious. "They come over with these bizarre messages that you would know already unless you were [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Jun 25th, 2007
What does it look like when a tree does some drawing? Like this.
Drawings produced by pens attached to the tips of tree branches, as the branches move in the wind the tree draws on to a panel or drawing board on an easel. Like signatures the trees drawings tell of the tree’s character; a [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Jun 21st, 2007
From New Scientist: Firstborn children are the cleverest.
Firstborn children score significantly higher in IQ tests than their younger siblings, according to a large study of 250,000 military draftees in Norway.
The researchers say the difference is due to social, not biological, factors, as younger siblings have higher IQs if they are raised as an eldest child [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on May 16th, 2007
It’s time to tell you about Kiva, which has quikly become one of my favourite websites ever. Kiva is a "do good in the world" kind of site, and wow! do they ever make it easy.
Here’s how it works. Some struggling farmer in Samoa (or baker in Nicaragua, or farmer in Tajikistan) needs a loan [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on May 8th, 2007
From the Beeb: Social lending gains net interest.
Pouring your cash into the far reaches of the world wide web may sound like a crazy idea.
After all, the internet has seen its fair share of nasties from phishing e-mails posing as a bank to key logging software pinching our passwords and personal information, all in an [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Apr 30th, 2007
From csmonitor.com: Spain’s collection agents practice public humiliation.
Jose Romero remembers the farmer from Alicante. The man owed money – a lot of it – and Mr. Romero sent one of his agents to collect the debt. When the collector arrived, the farmer told him to wait while he went in the house to get the [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Mar 30th, 2007
From the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society: Le Mont Solaire.
This past September the French army installed 600 one meter square reflective panels in the shape of Roman numerals on the sands of Mont Saint-Michel, a small rocky island off the coast of Normandy. The island’s 150-foot abbey spire cast a shadow three quarters of [...]
Posted in BC, miscellaneous, outdoors on Mar 15th, 2007
Isn’t this an amazing leaf? I’ve never seen one like it before, which just goes to show that I haven’t been paying enough attention. (You’d be surprised at what I’ve learned about the woods since we got a dog.)
Anyway, I’ll confess that it took me a while to figure out just what kind of plant [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Mar 10th, 2007
From Radio Praha: Czech wine company produces labels with Braille text.
Studying wine labels can be a daunting business if you are not a connoisseur and if you spend hours making up your mind what to select from your local wine-shop think how much harder things are for the blind, who would need to bring a [...]
Posted in miscellaneous on Mar 10th, 2007
From physorg.com: Sign language cell phone service created.
The world’s first sign language dictionary available from a mobile phone has been launched by the University of Bristol’s Centre for Deaf Studies.
Mobilesign.org is a video dictionary with over 5,000 British Sign Language signs. Produced by staff at the Centre for Deaf Studies, it is a mobile accessory [...]