Category: Interesting

At last check, he still has 18 to go, but he’s getting there. The guidelines he’s going to follow:

1. The total number of comments submitted in 100 hours must be at least 100.

2. Comments must be on topic (I’m not trying to contribute to webspam) […].

3. Comments submitted to sites on a blogroll or regularly read bloglist do not count toward the 100.

4. Neither do multiple comments on one weblog.

5. Linking/Trackbacking ties it all together.

I’m glad to say that I was part of this project, as comment number 55 (which is the only reason I knew about this project).

Apparently they catch fire. Freaky.

Alexa has 60+ terabytes of data they’ll sell you in a nice “portable” format. The Internet Archive uses this data.

So what the heck would you do with something like this, other than use it in a library?

100 Documents that shaped America. Not only do they provide nice little summaries of each, but give more detailed descriptions on each as well. A good historical reference.

If you’re using one to label CDs, expect to be able to label 968 of them. The same group that found out how much is inside paper towels, bacon bits, a keg, batteries, and shaving cream.

While Apple is still alive and kicking, there was a time there for a while that nobody had any idea if they’d survive. One former employee has stepped forward, calling the company a “massive failure” (at least during his employment) and goes in great detail as to why he believes that. Note that this article is NOT a critique of the current incarnation of Apple, but of the Apple of yesteryear. To quote his site:

This was written for former Apple employees, and in particular for those who worked at Apple during the same time as me, when the company grew, reached an apex in revenue, and then almost died. It’s an effort to draw some lessons from that experience.

A very interesting read, indeed.

According this article (which I tend to agree with), it’s certainly not the Pentagon. The Pentagon couldn’t defend the Pentagon. Quoted:

The passengers of Flight 93, who stormed their hijackers and brought their plane down in a field in Pennsylvania, managed by contrast in only 23 minutes to “gather information, deliberate, vote and act”–knowingly, selflessly, in the public interest, after many loving farewells by cell phone.

I’ll try not to do too many depressing 9/11 stories today, but they might come up.

Quadrillian (at least in the US system). A very interesting read on the various places of large numbers. It had been a while since I’ve known about half of them (I used to be a math geek). Link via BBspot.

Leave it to a high schooler with too much time on her hands during an internship to study this and present it to the world.

To quote the site:

This is an experimental blog by a three-year-old and his mom, to see how blogging helps a toddler learn by reading, writing (dictating), and recording his own history as it happens.

It’s actually a fun read, because I have a three-year old at home. To quote one entry:

My big Hulk hands make noise. They make “roar” sounds and say “crush” when I hit them together.

The Hulk is a little man who gets angry and gets Hulk hands. Then he turns green.

I want blue Hulk undies that turn green when I’m angry.

Fun stuff, and I hope that, if this site is indeed true, that the kid keeps a blog for quite a while, so we have a diary of the kid’s life.

The mom blogs a bit herself, and mentioned the site in a blog entry.

Thanks to nagging-typo-finder Barney for the link!