Way cool, Wikipedia

You know how the pronunciation guide used on Wikipedia, among other sites, is not the one you grew up with (if you're of a certain age)? It features many more characters and some different conventions. It's hard for me to make the effort to learn this new language, as it were, and so I am, from time to time, frustrated when I want to know how to pronounce something.

However, help is here!

I don't know how long this feature has been around on Wikipedia, but I just noticed it today: you can hover over an individual character in the phonetic spelling of a given word or name, and a tooltip will pop up, showing you what that particular character means!

Here's an example screenshot:

My life just got measurably better. Shoutout and many thanks to the Wikipedians who made this happen.

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Evidently, the money is being put to good use! ;)

I love little details like this

Here's a simple and clever authentication mechanism that's new to me:

Authorities watched as the truck arrived at about 1:55pm on October 23 to 3055 Dulles Drive in Mira Loma, California, a location near the airport in Ontario, California.

"This location is less than a mile away from where KARAC had received duffle bags containing cocaine form CHS1 a few months earlier," Monroe wrote.

She watched as Ignjatov and Hristovski got out of the truck to meet an "unknown man." Hristovski handed the man "an item, which looked like neither paper or money."

"I know, based on my training, experience, and knowledge of this investigation, that drug traffickers often use serial numbers on dollar bills as a method of identification when conducting drug transactions," Monroe added. "Accordingly, I believe that the item HRISTOVSKI handed to the unknown man may have been a dollar bill so that the unknown man could confirm the identity of IGNJATOV and HRISTOVSKI by the serial number on the bill."

(source)

Funny and cool

From today's Versioning email newsletter:

Finally, here’s an amazing image showing the world from space, partially occluded by the moon. Or, to put it in language millenials would understand: “the moon photobombed our big space selfie” [nasa].

Guest artist

A sequence of comic strips: one | two | three | four | five.

Back story.

(h/t: John McQuaid)

An animated puzzle

Swiped from Jake VanderPlas:

"... an impressively well-adapted resident of New York City."

The flying squirrel (Glaucomys volans) does not actually fly — it glides. When a squirrel leaps from its perch in a tall tree, it spreads its limbs, stretching out its two patagia (thick, furred membranes that extend from its wrists to its ankles). In this way, a squirrel less than 10 inches long (including a tail almost half that length) can, in a single bound, cover 150 feet or more, gliding through the treetops effortlessly.

Emph. added.

(source | more)

And you were worried about our coming ROBOT overlords

Yeah, because Zimmer didn't freak you out enough with that other thing.

As Humans Change Landscape, Brains of Some Animals Change, Too

Evolutionary biologists have come to recognize humans as a tremendous evolutionary force. In hospitals, we drive the evolution of resistant bacteria by giving patients antibiotics. In the oceans, we drive the evolution of small-bodied fish by catching the big ones.

In a new study, a University of Minnesota biologist, Emilie C. Snell-Rood, offers evidence suggesting we may be driving evolution in a more surprising way. As we alter the places where animals live, we may be fueling the evolution of bigger brains.

PSYCHO SHOWER SCENE SOUND EFFECT.

Just be careful who you call varmint cong from now on, is all I'm saying.

Also, at risk of being thought of as all Hoot-Smalley, I really hope I never meet Dr. Emelie, because I am sure I would end up calling her Prof. Rell-Snood.

(It's a Catholic thing. Just nod and play along. It'll all be over soon.)

(pic. source)

(?)

(??)

Doesn't this give you nerd wood?

"I can use Python, I can use C, I can use Perl, all the things I'm familiar with in a desktop computing environment," Kridner said. "If I want to have a tweeting robot that chases the cat around all day, I can make that."

Kridner would be "BeagleBoard.org co-founder Jason Kridner," and BeagleBoard.org would be a company that makes a $45 Linux PC.

Coupla things to watch

First is an ad that ran in preroll for some thoroughly unrelated video that I had gone looking for. Yes, an ad. It's about three minutes long.

It's a little sappy, but kind of cool, and yes, obviously constructed, but ... what can I say ... it ultimately left me affected.

(alt. video link)

Next is the bonus video from TBogg's latest Random Ten, about which he says:

This performance gives me goosebumps:

(alt. video link)

There is a Dead Can Dance box set that contains the entire concert that the above was taken from, and it is worth it for the DVD alone.

I have always felt that TBogg's taste in music and mine are offset by about one notch, but I really liked that.

Also.

Remember Spirograph?

Check this out.

(In case it's not obvious, you can drag the horizontal bar upwards, to show more of the bottom panel and less of the top.)

(h/t: Hacker Newsletter #144)

Wouldn't you know I'd happen across this just as it's getting warm out

Not that I'm complaining about the beautiful day, but I sure do wish I read about pykrete a few months earlier.

Forget about ice-9:

Pykrete is a super-ice, strengthened tremendously by mixing in wood pulp as it freezes. By freezing a slurry of 14 percent wood pulp, the mechanical strength of ice rockets up to a fairly consistent seventy kilograms per square centimeter. A 7.69 mm rifle bullet, when fired into pure ice, will penetrate to a depth of about thirty-six centimeters. Fired into pykrete, it will penetrate less than half as far—about the same distance as a bullet fired into brickwork. Yet you can mold pykrete into blocks from the simplest materials and then plane it, just like wood. And it has tremendous crush resistance: a one-inch column of the stuff will support an automobile. Moreover, it takes much longer to melt than pure ice. But as strong and eco-friendly as it is, pykrete remains forgotten today save among glaciologists, who express bafflement over why no one has made use of it.

Though the name suggests it, pykrete has nothing to do with Guido van Rossum. Rather, it was named for its inventor, Geoffrey Pyke, "who the Times of London once declared 'one of the most original if unrecognized figures of the present century.'"

For a brief time during World War II, it looked like the next big thing. Churchill, Mountbatten, and FDR all loved it. A fascinating story.

Inuitively, it still sounds like a great idea.

;)

Hat tip to Wired's Tim Maly: "How to Make an Indestructible Snow Fort."

I'm bad, I'm worldwide

From a page of last week's stats about visitors to this blog:

Unfortunately, due to cropping, the part in the right column header saying "(millions)" was truncated. We regret the error.

(title: cf.)

Nerd pr0n!

Hands-on fractals!

And next time we're in L.A., we've got to check out the Institute For Figuring.

(previously)

Congrats on surviving the Mayan Apocalypse. Now, here is your Skynet update.

X-37B!

A famously mysterious military space plane operated by the US Air Force has launched from Florida, the third flight in a secretive test programme.

The reusable, unmanned craft is designed to operate in Earth orbit for extended periods. Its prior missions in 2010 and 2011 lasted 224 and 469 days.

The US government kept the timing of Tuesday's launch secret and has not said how long the mission will last.

More links.

(previously)

This is way cool

Have a look at "Scratching the Surface, Two Picassos Revealed."

Nerd porn encore

If you liked Saturday's pix, you might also like Bryan Chan's "Time-lapse video: Space shuttle Endeavour’s trek across L.A."

It's a bit less than three minutes long.

(h/t: Ars Editor's Picks)

Your Saturday nerd porn: My SUV kicks your SUV's ass

[ + ]

The NYT has a slide show called "Endeavour Arrives in Los Angeles," featuring shots of the shuttle in the air, riding a 747 in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The accompanying article sent me in search of a larger version of the image above, which you can click, to see the success.

I ended up at the PJStar's photo blog, The Eye, which has a big bunch of fun shots of the shuttle on the ground and a bunch more of it in the air.¹

Yes, yes. The Shuttle program had its flaws. But I still get a thrill from looking at, you know, actual spaceships.

(previously)

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1. Answering, to my mind at least, the age-old question.

Blogger coolness: specialized feeds

Did you know that you can subscribe to a subset of posts on your favorite Blogger blog? Here are three examples to illustrate.

Just posts tagged "science:"

http://bjkeefe.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/science

Just posts tagged "cool:"

http://bjkeefe.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/cool

Just posts tagged both "cool" and "science:"

http://bjkeefe.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/cool/science

If you click those links, you'll see a rather spartan representation of the posts corresponding to those tags. (Or "labels," as Blogger insists on calling them.) If you want to subscribe to one of them, right-click the link and choose Copy Link Location, or whatever the exact wording is for your non-Firefox browser.* (screenshot)

What's that you say? THIS IS NOT YOUR FAVORITE BLOG? Sigh. Okay.

But seriously, you can follow the examples above to zero in on any Blogger blog. For example, if you want to be sure you never miss Mr. Riley's commentary on Mitch Daniels, grab this link.

http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Midwestern%20States%20Governed%20By%20Surly%20Megalomaniacs%20With%20Napoleonic%20Complexes

That should all be on one line, if you're not seeing the fancy horizontal scroll bar. Also, don't be put off by the repeated appearance of %20. That's just what you get when a URL has spaces in it.

You can play around to get the feeds you want just by typing into the address bar of your browser. The URLs are all going to start with http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/, and then you add on the tag or tags you want to narrow in on.

Thanks, David Kutcher!

__________

If you really want to geek out, you can use a little jQuery to rearrange feeds, such as those above, in all sorts of amazing ways.

And more generally, if you have a Blogger blog and want to get into some serious fiddling, have a look around Blogger Xpertise, which showed me the above. That is a cool site.

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* Terminology equivalents:
      Firefox: Copy Link Location
      Safari: Copy Link
      Chrome: Copy Link Address
      Opera: Copy Link Address
      SeaMonkey: Copy Link Location
      Maxthon: Copy Shortcut
      Internet Explorer: Copy Shortcut

This picture intentionally posted upside down

Can you guess what it is?

No, not the sad result of a child whose parents were too stern about nail-biting, although that's not a bad guess.

Right-side up version is #10 in a really great slide show of skeletons and skulls, which accompanies a short article, "Skulls Engineered for Hard Knocks."

Apart from the above, my faves were the Argentine horned frog (#2), which has none that I can see, and the Chinese water deer (#6), which … wait, what? Tusks?

Yep. And you thought Lyme disease was their biggest threat. Canadians will tell you different!

[Update 2013-09-12 10:37] See also.

Happy Easter!

Go to Google and type in this:

do a barrel roll

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(h/t: Kevin Boudloche)