I’m always on the lookout for sources of data on the web. Creating websites and writing software as I do, there is an amazing amount opf resources if you know where to look.
The geography network is one such source. As they says “The Geography Network is a global network of geographic information users and providers. It provides the infrastructure needed to support the sharing of geographic information among data providers, service providers, and users around the world. Through the Geography Network, you can access many types of geographic content including dynamic maps, downloadable data, and more advanced Web services.”
There’s an excellent widget that lets you select the area and then you can list the data sources available for that area. Not everyone needs or uses geographical data but if you do…
Mind you, they do have some weird ideas about how the web works, in particular hyper-linking to their site. D’uh- chaps. Do you ask every search engine to fill in one of these forms? If not then why should other people?
Popularity: 9% [?]
Well we’ve seen innumerable uses of Lego, from making cars, in pop videos, and a Lego church but on this website, it is used to illustrate the bible and apparently seems very popular.
At first I thought it was a spoof site- with titles like “David mutilates 200- gets Married” or “The Great Pen*s Debate” (Yes that is a letter i lurking behind the *! Think of the filters!) but these scenes are lovingly created with Lego figures and then captioned. The first picture in “Stephen gets Stoned” is brilliant- that man is off his head er…
I’d say this site qualifies for a labour of love- there’s loads of stuff on it. I wonder when the Koran will follow and as for the Karma Sutra.. it’s probably been done in Lego (if you know where- do tell!)
Popularity: 15% [?]
The previous version of Portent had pictures that were 368 pixels wide which is just a bit big now- the text is squeezed so I’m trying out different sizes to try and get it right.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Imagine fitting jet turbine engines (small ones) to the likes of pickup trucks or Sinclair C5s. Ideal for racing boy racers off from traffic lights though somehow I cannot see these as being exactly road worthy.
That’s what this website is about- with photos of descriptions. Fancy a turbo jet go-kart? There are also videos of some of the tests. Fascinating stuff!
Popularity: 15% [?]
Same old stuff but please bear with us as it’s changed over to Wordpress. It took a few days to get the old stories imported etc…that’s done- just had to get the pictures imported and now just tidy up the layout etc, add in old links etc.
Note to Pivotlog Users- I really liked Pivotlog - but it was eating up CPU time and my hosting providers were getting upset - this got suspended once.
If you are ever needing to move a Pivot blog to Wordpress import, I recommend the import script here and his Pivot image translation tag (linked off that page). I added two comments for modifying the path it produces. Of course if you feel unable to do this, just send me £50 and I’ll do it for you. (Hey serious offer!)
Popularity: 15% [?]
A Phrase that is bound to baffle French readers ‘Bans Comic Sans’ (It translates as “round of applause comic without”!) is a protest about the overuse or misuse of the 12 year old Microsoft Font. 
As they say “The typeface has been used in countless contexts from
restaurant signage to college exams to medical information. These
widespread abuses of printed type threaten to erode the very
foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built.”
Hence this website. I must confess I have, in the past committed crimes against good taste in the use of Fonts. Repeated exposure to toxic pages has left me with a minimalistic approach to font usage. Fewer is better. But I do still occasionally use Comic Sans. I suspect this site should be taken with a big piece of salt!
Popularity: 8% [?]
I love looking at old maps, this is a particularly good one. It’s amazing how many of the major European countries existed then. Also interesting is Spain which is mostly part of the Califate. Islam was spectacularly successful at conquering North Africa, the middle East and most of Spain. It took a lot of fighting for the Spanish to recapture Spain from the ‘Moors’ in the Reconquista which took seven centuries from 722 to 1492.
Warning- you may experience popups on this site.
Popularity: 13% [?]
In the past Internet Explorer was very non standard and was very easy to subvert so that trojans etc could be downloaded and your PC filled with nasties. This poster promotes Firefox by showing a screen of IE full of toolbars and LavaSoft's Ad Aware having found 152,000 nasties!
To be fair to Microisoft they have improved it but IE is still not as standards compliant as it could be.
Popularity: 8% [?]
There were some hosting issues yesterday and the day before. Hopefully we’ll keep those to a minimum.
Popularity: 9% [?]
This is quite clever. In all CPUs there are circuits for doing arithmetic. One is an adder. It er adds numbers. It works in binary (all ones and zeroes). If you add 1 to 1 you 10 (in binary- the equivalent of 2 in decimal). You can read more about adders on wikipedia.
Matthias Wandell is into making things in wood. So he has implemented an adder in wood using marbles. In fact he does a lot of stuff in wood, and his site is an excellent tribute to one of the oldest materials and its uses! Theres a video of the adder in operation on this page as well. It’s very ingenious and not a bad way to demonstrate binary addition.
If you don’t like wood he also has a Lego version and other lego machines on this page.
Popularity: 17% [?]
With its own section on the U.S. Geological Section, the earthquakes Hazard Program is a database of earthquakes around the world that is kept very up to date. Just two days ago for instance there was a 5.5 magnitude quake in Iran just 15 miles from the city of Qom. Yesterday evening there was a 5.1 just 100 miles from Tonga in the Pacific.
Of course if you're interested in historical quakes, such as the biggest ever (in Chile in 1960- 9.5!). I like the fact that the website is itself earthquake proof (by being mirrored). You can also see an hour by hour animation for the last seven days. This is an excellent and very up-to-date resource.
Popularity: 8% [?]
The use of tricks, whether it be mirrors or light or paintings to make a room look bigger is well known. But these wall paintings are pretty clever. My favourite is the one with the scroll and the chest.
If you like these then you might also like this set which are different but also 3D.
Popularity: 11% [?]
One of the problems teaching statistics is that it can be a very boring subject. Yet there are probably more people who would benefit from knowing a bit more about probability- eg Poker players.
There can be other spin offs as well. A few years back I had to write a program to scan a rival company’s website to see how many houses they had for sale on it. They said 80,000 but we didn’t believe them. They had a feature where you could search by postcode district and it told you how many there were in that district. Now there are 2,800 such districts in the UK so I had the program do the queries randomly and slowly so it wouldn’t attract attention. As each district was done, it updated a count of all the properties and an average number of properties per district. Multiplying this by 2,800 gave an estimate of how many properties there were in total. After 40 or 50 the estimated figure had settled around 40,000 and stayed there. This is sampling theory in practice. There was no need to read all 2,800 districts - just 40 or 50.
Exploring data is a ten year old Australian website that tries to illustrate statistics in a more interesting and involving way, using real data and real problems. It contains
activities, worksheets, overhead transparency masters,
datasets and assessment to support data exploration plus an extensive collection of articles.If you don’t know the difference between a stem plot or a dot plot this is the place to look. There is a lot here.
Popularity: 9% [?]
The world is a bit divided about Google. It’s a great search engine and Google Maps is just amazing as is Google Earth, Gmail etc etc. But Google collects a lot of information about you. For example if you are logged in to Google and do a search your search is recorded.
Now my own belief is that they just want to make money, which they are very good at doing, but some people are concerned enough (but still like using Google to do searches) hence scroogle. I can’t imagine how they got the name.. Screw Google? Surely not! So that’s what Scroogle does. You can run google searches indirectly through it so it can’t be traced and recorded against you.
While Google itself isn’t evil, the data it collects could be used against you, like Yahoo did with giving up information about a Chinese blogger who is now in jail. Last year Google resisted attempts by the US Govt to get hold of some of its data but in the future…
Popularity: 9% [?]
I really like this concept - it appeals to my fundamentally subversive nature. The Yes Men is an informal organisation of people who expose corporate idiocy and similar by impersonating them at conferences and giving talks, presentations etc on totally ludicrous subjects. If you know some of the work of the English comedian Mark Thomas it will set the context.
Some of the stunts they have pulled including pushing slavery as a WTO idea and selling the idea of using corpses from climate change events as a replacement fuel. They have even issued their own 52 card deck with corporate leaders on, like the US did with Saddam and terrorists. They are keen to recruit so if yo have any ideas …
Popularity: 8% [?]