This horrible device plays Christmas songs through a speaker when you unfurl your toilet-paper. That is, it would if it worked. One angry customer wrote “It product is very bad. I don’t like is bad.” If you want to see what the target market for this product types like when they’re mad, there are six other reviews.
Wake your partner up in terror every morning with the Anime Sleep Mask.
Chapter 8, Verse 11
Over at Forbes, I’ve been posting my take on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The book was written in short verses, and each verse now has a corresponding diagram. In total, there are almost 300 illustrations.
It’s a project that was a lot of fun to draw and noodle on, and one I’m rather proud of. Have a look:
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 1: Laying Plans)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 2: Waging War)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 3: Attack by Stratagem)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 4: Tactical Dispositions)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 5: Energy)
Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War, Illustrated (Chapter 6: Weak Points And Strong)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 7: Maneuvering)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 8: Variation in Tactics)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 9: The Army on the March)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 10: Terrain)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 11: The Nine Situations, Part 1)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 11: The Nine Situations, Part 2)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 12: Attack by Fire)
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 13: The Use of Spies)
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Image: Flickr
Twenty years ago, 11,000 people planted 11,000 trees on an artificial mountain near Ylöjärvi, Finland. The trees were planted in a mathematical pattern based on the golden section; in time they will grow into a virgin forest each tree of which has a designated custodian. The trees can change ownership, but they can never be removed from the forest, and the mountain itself can never be owned or sold.
Artist Agnes Denes conceived the project in 1982, and the Finnish government undertook it 10 years later. The site is legally protected for the next 400 years.
In 1993, I attended a technology and art conference, ‘Ars Electronica,’ in Linz, Austria, where my former postdoctoral student Pattie Maes gave a talk titled ‘Why Immortality Is a Dead Idea.’ She took as many people as she could find who had publicly predicted downloading of consciousness into silicon, and plotted the dates of their predictions, along with when they themselves would turn seventy years old. Not too surprisingly, the years matched up for each of them. Three score and ten years from their individual births, technology would be ripe for them to download their consciousness into a computer. Just in the nick of time! They were each, in their own minds, going to be remarkably lucky, to be in just the right place at the right time.
– MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines, 2003
Hpeckerbrilliant
Conditions that have been associated with season of birth. (Information from Current Biology)
Thanks a lot, March.
In his 1936 collection Brush Up Your Wits, British puzzle maven Hubert Phillips relates that his brother-in-law felt himself cursed with an unintelligent maid. “I have just overheard her taking a ‘phone call,” he told Phillips, “and this is what I heard:
“‘Is Mr. Smith at home?’
“‘I will ask him, sir. What name shall I give him?’
“‘Quoit.’
“‘What’s that, sir?’
“‘Quoit.’
“‘Would you mind spelling it?’
“‘Q for quagga, U for umbrella, O for omnibus, I for idiot –’
“‘I for what, sir?’
“‘I for idiot, T for telephone. Q, U, O, I, T, Quoit.’
“‘Thank you, sir.’”
Why did he accuse her of unintelligence?
HpeckerMildly interesting
In 1959, in response to a challenge by a radio station, Norwegian insulation manufacturer Glassvatt transported a three-ton block of ice from the Arctic Circle to the equator without refrigeration.
The block, insulated with wood and glass wool, was loaded onto a truck that made its way south through Europe, crossed by freighter from Marseilles to Algiers, and then crossed the Sahara, evading guerrillas and continually bogging down in the sand.
After three weeks the crew arrived in Lambaréné, Gabon, where they delivered 300 kg of medicine to Albert Schweitzer, and they reached their destination, Libreville, a week later. Amazingly, the ice block had lost only 11 percent of its weight. They cut it up, shared it among the citizens of the equatorial city, and flew back to Norway.
Since 1966, Japanese artist On Kawara has been producing paintings that depict only the date of their creation, executed in liquitex on canvas in eight standard sizes. If he can’t complete a painting on the day he starts it, he destroys it. Each entry in the series is painted carefully by hand in the language of the country in which he produces it; to date he’s completed more than 2,000 paintings in 112 countries, and he says he’ll continue until he dies.
Is this valuable? Yes: In 2006 Christie’s sold Nov. 8, 1989 for £310,000.
In the world of “Horny Ghost Of Osama Bin Laden,” the dead terrorist leader increases his ghost-power by having sex with American women. You can read part of it (and see the unblurred version of the cover) on the product listing page.
Kind of feel like this is not a real college.
WHAT A WEIRD COINCIDENCE
When I loved you
And you loved me,
You were the sea,
The sky, the tree.
Now skies are skies,
And seas are seas,
And trees are brown
And they are trees.
– Charles A. Wagner
A nursing student named Janelle asked Adventure Time character designer Matt Forsythe to interpret the "Wong-Baker Facial Grimace Scale" — used to help kids describe how much pain they feel — using Finn. The result is just great.
might start using this to code my migraines
HpeckerDay of the Mutant Zombies
In 1916, after extensive study, French writer Georges Polti announced that all the stories in classical and modern literature could be reduced to 36 essential situations:
For example, the Sherlock Holmes stories are an example of situation 3; Madame Bovary of situation 25; Romeo and Juliet of situation 29; and Crime and Punishment of situation 34. (The full text is here.) Correspondingly, he claimed, in life there are only 36 emotions, whose “unceasing ebb and flow … fills human history like the tides of the sea.”
Though he found that 36 categories were enough “to distribute fitly among them the innumerable dramas awaiting classification,” Polti felt that his system shouldn’t inhibit the creativity of future writers. “Any writer may have here a starting-point for observation and creation, outside the world of paper and print, a starting-point personal to himself.”
HpeckerSo there's hope for someone with a last name like mine
Banker James M. Fail repeatedly donated money to his alma mater, the University of Alabama, which he credited for his success in the business world. But he declined opportunities to give his name to an Alabama facility. “After all,” he said, “who would want anything with the name ‘Fail’ on it?”
In 2008 he found a way to support the school and accept credit — he put his name on the visitors’ locker room.
When minister Francis Bellamy published the American Pledge of Allegiance in Youth’s Companion in 1892, his colleague James Upham devised a salute to go along with it, snapping the heels together and extending the right arm toward the flag:
At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute — right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ At the words, ‘to my Flag,’ the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.
This worked fine until the 1920s, when Italian fascists and then German Nazis adopted similar salutes. Congress delicately changed the American salute to the hand-on-heart gesture in 1942.
HpeckerWhoa!
Rats have pretty well overrun the globe, but there’s one exception: Alberta, Canada, which has waged a successful war against the critters for 50 years. Owning rats is forbidden to Alberta residents; they can be kept only by zoos and research institutions. The province maintains a rat control zone 600 kilometers long along its eastern border, staffed by eight professionals, and any rats they find are poisoned, gassed, or shot.
“Alberta is the only province with rat-free status, and we take this very seriously,” Verlyn Olson, minister of agriculture and rural development, said in an August statement. “We have lived without the menace of rats since 1950, when our control program began.”
But it’s a constant battle. In 2003 pest specialist John B. Bourne told National Geographic that he worries the wily creatures will hitch a ride to the interior aboard a truck or train. “They are so adaptive, so intelligent, so successful and physically capable … that it would not surprise me if they show up in a place where you’d least expect a rat to show up. I have the greatest respect for this rodent’s resourcefulness, and [its] capabilities scare the hell out of me.”
!['Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/simple_answers.png "'Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.")
