Six-word memoirs

The thing I like most about using twitter is the brevity of it. Few of my ideas fit naturally into 140 characters. They need to be distilled, concentrated. I'm forced to pare away every extraneous shift in thought, to ask myself "What is it that I want to say". The end result of this process is not always beautiful. I sometimes find myself resorting to abbreviation, poor grammar, or other shortcuts. But in the best cases, I end with a pure thought inless than 141 characters.

Now that you know what I like about twitter, you might correctly guess that I 'm a huge fan of smithmag's six-word memoirs. Even more brief, and requiring a degree of concentration that's a bit frightening - an entire life distilled into six words. Of course not everyone tries to encapsulate a life. There are six-words discussing love affairs, New Year's resolutions, job loss and every other thing that might feel like a whole life in a given moment. But, in my opinion, the entries that actually attempt to encapsulate a life are the best. I'll list a few here for your perusal. Mine's the last one.


Not quite what I was planning.

Shy mother bewildered by self-confident daughter.

I do not snap: I flex.

Brought it to a boil, often . (This one by Mario Batali)

I am stronger than they think.

Found a few worth my time.

When you care enough to hit send

Finally a great new free e-card website! These are the e-cards you really want to send - not just the ones you'll settle for. For instance, view the card sent to me by MiddleBrother on my birthday (September 11th) , at right. Or the card I sent him, inspired by recent developments in the presidential race (below). OK, so maybe they're not appropriate for your 10-year old niece's birthday, but they're perfect for friends and (some) family (your mileage may vary).

This concludes my dump of websites I've recently learned about, and about which I am currently obsessing. We now return you to your regular incoherent and crotchety ranting about the sorry state of the universe. (Quarks!?! Why when I was a boy, we didn't have quarks. We had protons, and neutrons, and we liked it!)

youniverse

Here's an interesting twist on those endless personality test websites. You answer questions by clicking on one of a dozen pictures. They call the end result your Visual DNA. I think you may have to set up an account to do it. Then once you've completed a survey, they show you other people who have similar Visual DNA. Kinda cool. And they've got a load of different surveys - TV preferences, vacation preferences, etc., in addition to the basic personality test survey. And of course, you can grab your results for inclusion in your myspace page, or blog - if you're into that kind of thing. If you find personality tests horribly addictive, then don't click on this link, and call your 12-step sponsor immediately.

Thanks, to TheWife for showing this to me!

Mutating Faces

Boingboing turned me on to this cool timewaster yesterday. It's at mutatingpictures.com. You rate pictures based on how much they look like human faces. The site started with a screen full of random triangles but, those that get higher votes have more offspring (asexual reproduction). By lunchtime today, many of the pics have a sort of Cartoon Samurai look. I can't wait to see how it looks by tommorrow. Even this morning, most of the faces had eyes that were a single black triangle. But now, at lunch time, outlined eyes are beginning to appear. It's really wild. Check out these screen caps - an initial image at left, and a recent one at right. Dramatic improvement in faciness in just one day!
UPDATE: A second set of faces and a set of animals is now cycling through the site. Check it!

BestStuff

I haven't had much of a chance to explore the site, but this seems like a pretty cool idea. Set up a free account. Find a category, or create one, then enter the best things in that category. Others can vote on which item in that category is best. For instance, in the category Best thing to say while taking a photo, we find the suggestion "Soylent green is people." In the category Best Cheese, we find around 50 contenders, ranging from Mozzarella at the top with 65 votes (at the time of this entry), and poor little Maasdam(a swiss type cheese from the Netherlands) at the bottom without a single vote. Maasdam will likely go and eat some worms now. Pobre rosita! Pobre pequeno Maasdam..

Internet Access Screening

Matt Baldwin at Defective Yeti has come up with an ingenious plan to keep many of the idiots off of the internet. You know the ones, they post 'FIRST!' every time they read a post without comments. Also, they typically lack a functioning command of the english language, using phrases like " I need to loose some weight" or "did you here about Jamie?" or "I never would of gone" or "there going shopping today". Well, if each IP simply installs the little gizmo from this page as a gateway to the internet, the problem will be solved. Check it out!

Population cartogram

This is pretty neat. They call it a population cartogram. Basically, it's a world map distorted so that the size of each country is proportional to its population. Click the map for a bigger image.

I like this because it helps me to quickly "intuitivize" data that would take lots of thinking and head scratching to otherwise grasp. Some interesting tidbits on the cartogram:

• check out the relative sizes of Australia and Indonesia, Mexico and Japan.


• or look at Nigeria. It's freaking huge!


• and speaking of huge... check out China. Now compare that to Russia. Tell me again why I used to think of the Soviet Union when I thought of communism?
  

Thanks to strangemaps for showing this to me!