Portent

Stirrdup.com is a user contributed website where people submit stories (links to other websites that interest site readers) and they get voted up or down like Digg.com or reddit.com. However Stirrdup is different, they use a passive voting system so that instead of people activly voting a story up or down, it is how the story is viewed that affects the voting.

This should be less prone to manipulation, an accusation often levelled at reddit.com and digg.com and actually end up with people rerading stories, not just judging by a headline plus a few lines. 

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Popularity: 3% [?]

The BSA (Business Software Alliance, not the Boy Scouts of America, Botanical Society of America or the Brazilian Space Agency!) is a real organisation that hunts down people using unlicenced software in companies.

They have produced a simple Flash game- can you find who is using unlicensed software in the company?

I notice they call this “Software Cluedo”. I do hope they’ve licensed the use of the word Cluedo from Hasbro (in which case shouldn’t it have a trademark symbol?). Wouldn’t it be ironic if they hadn’t licensed it…?

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Watching a solid chunk of metal being carved by a machine into a high precision engine block is just amazing. When you realise that the accuracy of the carving is fractions of a millimetre, the precision of the carving robot is a wonder.

This 10 minute video shows the block, from start to finished block. An incredible testimony to modern engineering.

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Popularity: 14% [?]

Another highly stressful "move the cursor" game in Flash. The screen dump doesn't show the cursor, but it was somewhere in the middle of those dots which home in the cursor where ever you move it. All you have to do is keep moving the cursor but avoid the edge or touching a dot. Getting a screen dump single-handedly under such conditions was challenging!

If you can last 15 seconds you are doing well, 30 and you must be cheating! (Apparently it's possible to cheat though they don't say how!)

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Popularity: 1% [?]

This runs in a Java applet so you need Java installed. Being a computer programmer with a strong interest in computer science, I've always found simulations interesting.  Things like optimising lifts, checkout queues and road traffic.

This simulation has cars and trucks moving on 6 different tracks with variable simulation speed, traffic flow, on ramp flow speed, percentage of trucks etc. you can see what happens if you set different speed limits when there is a lane closure etc. Interesting stuff and a bit of a toy! 

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Yet another "Find Music" website! That's the 4th. This one is a little different from the rest because you can record your voice and then it matches using that. In their word "Our mission is to build the most comprehensive database of searchable
music. You can contribute to the database by singing in midomi's online
recording studio in any language or genre. The next time anyone
searches for that song, your performance might be the top result! At midomi you can create your own profile, sing your favorite songs and
share them with your friends and get discovered by other midomi users.
You can listen to and rate others' musical performances, see their
pictures, send them messages, buy original music, and more."

So there is a bit of a community- you do also have the option of searching for artists by name, song etc and buying a song. No indication of whether the songs you can buy have DRM in them (ie restrict copying, playing on other computers) but I'd guess yes unless told otherwise.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

This is a simple test of your reactions.  Move the blue ball with your mouse and avoid being touched by a red ball. That's it. It starts with three red balls and gets increasingly more frenetic as more are added.

By the time you get to 8 or 9 balls you will either be a gibbering wreck or the coolest player alive!

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Popularity: 1% [?]

No this isn't a flying Jellyfish about to devour a man but is what a Florida Harvester Ants Nest looks like if you make a plaster cast of the inside of it. This is a highly academic article but quite interesting, about the habits of the ants, how they did their nests etc. It also has 18 photos and figures about the nests.  

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Popularity: 1% [?]

This is another-"if you like this band you might like this other band" type website like Pandora and LivePlasma. I'm sure it won't be the last. Each works in a different way - with Music Map, the closer two artists or bands are, the more they believe that you will like the other band.

I tried it for Electric Light Orchestra and got Canned Heat, Procul Harem and Travelling Wilbury's so I do like two of those. Bear in mind that ELO's Jeff Lynne was in the Travelling Wilbury's! I don't knwo Canned Heat so must try listening to them…

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Popularity: 1% [?]

The average human has less than two legs. Strange but true, as there are a number of people with one or zero legs but very few with more than two legs so the average must be less than two.  

This page- which has hardly any images so I used one from Wikipedia of a coccyx has a list of body parts that are generally no longer common in man, but still occur.   8% of the population for example has a thirteenth rib. The coccyx is the remnants of a fused tail and as for neck ribs… Apparently 1% of the population have those. Or extrinsic ear muscles that are useful for waggling your ears but not much else.  It's a fascinating read.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Where can you see 106,438 Glass Art Pictures by 2,302 Artists? At glassartists.org, a very impressive website community. Whether it's sculptures, beads, bowls, stained or raw glass, functional or artistic you'll probably find it here. Be sure to visit the Top 100 galleries- these are chosen to be extra special and you will not be disappointed!

If you are an artist in glass, join up and put your work online for others to see and buy.  

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Popularity: 1% [?]

This is a visual dictionary, with an interface in Flash so it's quite slick. Put in a word and it will display it with connected words. The colour coding is blue nouns, gren verbs, orange adjectives and pink adverbs (where are the red swear words!!)  

You can drag the whole shape by clicking and dragging or zoom in/out with a mouse scroll wheel. Double click a connected word and connections open to words connected to it. Very impressive.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Whenever I find a new search engine, I look to see where they get their data from and where portent ranks! This one takes a little getting used to- but the idea is that it helps you winnow down what you're looking for by displaying associated words and when you move the cursor over one of those, it shows you the search results on the right hand side.

I searched for Portent- not in the top ten (It is with some search engines eg google, but not this which is Yahoo) and then moved over the word stuff and there it was in 2nd and 3rd place- links to portent.org stories. Not that anyone really searches for the word portent!

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Popularity: 1% [?]

The convention of North being up only really applies on Earth. If you were in a spaceship approaching the Earth from the south pole then this map is what it might look like. (If you ignore changes due to the projection of the map).

You can buy this map from his website. It includes an inset, which shows global views from various angles. In addition, other inset maps show examples of a variety of projections with notes on their merits and limitations.

Of course here in the UK, we are used to joking about Australian (and New Zealand) things being upside down, so you could show this as a "genuine Australian map!!".

Be sure to click the Whats behind the Map link as the page there has a fascinating set of other maps and projections.  

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Are you a technophobe or can you program the video? (hint- they're called PVRs these days - video is sooo old fashioned!). This site asks you 20 questions and rates your technical abilty. I got one wrong- d'oh, ironically I didn't know how many bloggers there were in the UK! Otherwise my TQ rating is 148 which rates me as Techy Genius!

One thing to bear in mind is that it is a bit UK oriented.  Nice graphics and layout and a fun few minutes to put down your work colleagues or spouse!

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Popularity: 1% [?]