Friday movie

Star Wars in old-skool animated .gif form. Cool.

Do you sneeze when you look at bright lights?

Lots of people think I'm weird for looking towards the sun or at other bright lights when I need to sneeze. I have now found out that it is a known medical condition called Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome. Read about it here. It was noticed by Karen that this can be shortened to ACHOO syndrome, and it must be a prank. But no! A search of Google Scholar reveals that it is a documented condition. The reason that I sneeze when looking at the sun is that I have ACHOO syndrome.

The swirling vortex of doom

Via look at this. This is an amazing article about an accidentally-created man-made whirlpool that turned an 11-feet-deep freshwater lake into a 1300-feet-deep saltwater lake. Wow.

Pet food "good" for you?

The Sun reports that "boffins" have decided that dog food is better for you than many fast foods, especially KFC. Did you know that adding fries to your KFC order technically makes it healthier? It reduces the coronarally-high levels of overall fat per 100g in the meal...

15 best skylines in the world

In this urban planner's opinion. I've been to 5 of these, and Hong Kong is way, way, out in front.

The American world

How Americans see the world (click for bigger). Thanks Leanne.

How to pronounce those pesky menu items

Via Slashfood, a handy guide on pronouncing the names of common dishes with a foreign origin. Remember, it's broo-sket-a, not broo-shet-a!

Google sightseeing

Google sightseeing is great if you enjoy Google Earth or Maps. It has loads of famous landmarks, quirks, and interesting stuff.

Oh my god, they killed Chef!

Edit: gone, read this.

Snakes on a plane

I've been excited about this ever since I first heard about it. The plot synopsis is genious: On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean, an assassin, bent on killing a passenger who's a witness in protective custody, lets loose a crate full of deadly snakes. The film stars Samuel L Jackson. How can this not be good? And now, some footage. Click for the trailer.

Visual Complexity

This is a nice little site: a gallery of complex diagrams, maps, graphs etc. Some of the pictures are quite artistic, actually.

I know it's as old as the hills...

But I still find it funny: a list of unfortunately named authors on Amazon.

Makes me laugh, anyway...

South Park Scientology episode

The viseo below is the episode of South Park that Tom Cruise managed to get banned (BBC story), and caused Isaac Hayes to quit (no pressure from his fellow Scientologists, I presume?).

EDIT. It's gone. Read this, then this.

Nice way to quit

Spam Cartoons

This guy draws cartoons based upon spam email headers. Thanks Simon.

Best radio advert ever?

Via b3ta: this is the best, and worst, advert that I have ever heard. Who the hell comes up with this stuff?

Singapore photos

I've been adding some more photos to my Flickr account. Here is a set of photos of my day in Singapore last November. Quite a nice place, very modern and well laid out but a little soulless.

How evil are you?

Via nothing to do with Arbroath. Find out how evil you are with this test. I am only 46% evil. How disappointing.

It's not often I agree with a hook-handed mentalist, but...

Abu Hamza is on hunger strike because he is being fed pot noodles in prison. He thinks that they are "peasant food". Spot on. And how will he manage to open his sachet of sauce? Does he have a scissor attachment?

How to make the perfect pizza

Looks like you need an oven that goes above 400ºC... This article is a tale of one man's quest to find the perfect pizza.

How to destroy the Earth

This is an excellent article on the science behind various ways to destroy the Earth. I personally think that the microscopic black hole theory is more likely than the paltry 3/10 he gives it. The page also includes some excellent career advice in case you are planning on destroying the Earth, and a useful status indicator for the current condition of the planet:

Google Mars

Nice one Google. An interactive map of Mars with details on features such as craters, mountains and spacecraft. It says in the FAQ that they are looking at integrating it with the Google Earth engine. That would be smart.

Rolling Krispies

In 1963, the Rolling Stones made an advert for Rice Krispies. Honestly, check the facts out if you don't believe me! Here it is, from b3ta.

Troy

Via Kottke: a blog set in the Trojan War. Nicely done.

Insulting movie physics

Planet of the apes. Debunking of lots of the physics, but I like:

The spacestation, of course, includes a major facility for training apes to fly spacepods. After all, humans are just too valuable to risk on dangerous missions, and apparently no one has heard of robots or remote-controlled vehicles.

Geography of Seinfeld

A clickable Google map with the major Seinfeld locations marked and detailed. From look at this.

Survival test

See how you would cope in variuos life-threatening situations by taking the survival test.

Optical trickery

Via look at this: a selection of optical illusions and puzzles

Progress?

Just a quick response to Simon's post on March 7th talking about us "johnny-come-lately" plebs who are filling up the internet. Surely the blog revolution is a great thing? Now anyone can make their voice heard, not just the people with their own servers and/or knowledge of HTML. Sorry for going all left-wing, but doesn't free speech for all mean that you can speak rubbish and spell it badly if you want to? Without Blogger and its ilk, we would not have been able to read such diverse things as:

Death row blog
Hamburger blog
Police chief blog
Post secret
Overheard in New York
NHS Doctor blog
And, of course, MC Hammer's blog

I could go on. That was just blogs though: MySpace, whilst being a home for American teenagers, has allowed bands to get music to fans without going through a record label. Would the Arctic Monkeys have been signed without it? At least partly due to MySpace, they had a number 1 single (selling over 300,000 copies) and number 1 album (the fastest selling British album of all time, 1 million copies and counting). Sure, there might be a lot of crap filling up the internet, but it has allowed people to get closer (and the world to get smaller) than ever before.

On the blogging software: would you open a ring-pull can of beans with a can opener just because that is the way that it was always done? If the tools are there to make things easier, then why not use them? I put the line breaks in this post using html, but used the software to add the links. Why? Because it saved me time.

That's my two cents. Back to service as normal.

Bembo's Zoo

Hard to describe, but awesome. Click on a letter and watch an animal with that name emerge.

Schindler's lifts

Via nothing to do with Arbroath. Established in 1874, Schindler's Lifts is the world's biggest manufacturer of escalators. I bet Spielberg wishes he had made that film instead.

Holy ship

From kottke: an interactive, real-ish-time map of all the ships on the sea. Really cool. You can zoom right in as well.

Live action version of Simpsons opening sequence

Niiice...

Film Budgets

From the Smoking Gun via Kottke: an article on the budgets of the films of M Night Shyamalan. Haley Joel Osment was paid $150,000 for The Sixth Sense; Bruce Willis's private jet tab for the same film was $450,000. Mel Gibson was paid $25,000,000 for his role in Signs. Really interesting stuff.

Snow Photos

I've put a photoset of the great Aberdeen snow of March 2006 on flickr

Papist or rapist?

From b3ta: take the papist or rapist quiz.

Best. Blog. Ever.

Chewy

No caption needed

Great company name

The company that makes Semtex is called Explosia. I would love to work for them, if only for the business cards.

Beadlewatch

Subversive video games

Via kottke. Stories about willfully difficult video games:

• Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors, which includes a level where you drive a bus for 12 hours in real time to score a single point.
• Takeshi Kitano's Takeshi no Chousenjou, where the final boss is killed by being punched 20,000 times. This is the same Takeshi Kitano of Takeshi's castle and super-violent film directing fame. He was the teacher/murderous administrator in Battle Royale.

Microsoft re-designs the iPod packaging

EDIT: It turns out that Microsoft really did re-design the iPod packaging. Good on them for having a sense of humour about their weaknesses.