Monthly Archives: August 2000

August 10 2000

Humor

Über Wirtschaftswissenschaftler und Mathematiker.

Words, words, words!

Wow, this is at least as cool as the soda constructor! Garret and Craig both linked to plumbdesign Visual Thesaurus. It starts with a word floating in free space, more words dangling on arms. If you click one of the other words, it sprouts arms with words as well. Amazing!

Hey, it can even display words in 3D – help, I won’t be able to stop playing around with it…

The most accurate flat map of the earth

can be found here.

Looks unusual!

August 9 2000

Wörterbücher

It seems Garret is getting serious about learnin German. He has a link to some dictionaries. I had a look at BritSpeak, a British-American English dictionary which also includes a section on Problem Words.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

A Solar Filament Lifts Off. Very impressive.

Link via Bastian.

From the daily sex dept.

NetDyslexia yesterday:

“Visitors crowded into the greenhouse of the University of Leiden for a peek at the rare blossom, which gives off a pungent stench of rotting fish and putrid meat.” Does anyone remember, that Andrea reported about the Titanwurz recently? She did not tell us that this plant is also called penis plant. There is a Salon article entitled “Penis flower fans storm Netherlands” about this rare phenomenon – surprisingly filed under “Sex”.

Hey, I didn’t know about that. Somehow, the Botanischer Garten der Uni Bonn didn’t tell on their website…

Da fällt mir auf, hier ist auch noch ein schönes Bild von der Blüte…

Setting up the search engine for a Manila Site

August 8 2000

Links

Brent redesigned his weblog and got rid of the links to other sites in the navigation bar because he doesn’t use them anyway. Garret says he uses his site – and those links – as a gateway for his surfing. He wonders if anybody else uses his links.

You’ve probably noticed that I have a list of weblog links, too. I also use them like Garret does, especially if I’m not using my own computer. It’s an easy way to take your bookmarks with you.

I also try to keep the list up-to-date. I add new links as I find myself surfing back to a weblog several days in a row, and every couple of weeks I browse through all the links and decide whether there are some I don’t visit any more.

I also use other people’s weblog lists sometimes, especially when a lot of entries are highlighted as visited links, but some are not: “Hey, this person reads many of the weblogs I visit regularly, but he/she has three links to sites I don’t know. Let’s see, they could be interesting to me, too…”

Thanks, Garret, for the chapel!

Babelfish

Haha! Nachdem ich es auch endlich geschafft habe, den Babelfish zu bewegen, was für mich zu übersetzen, habe ich mir mal meine Seite auf Deutsch übersetzen lassen. Hier ist zum Beispiel die Seite von heute. Interessant wird es natürlich erst unter diesem Eintrag, wo es auf Englisch weitergeht… zum Beispiel: Willkommen zurück, Jeff ! Nizza zum wieder Sehen Sie. Und “poor guy” wird mit “armes Halteseil” übersetzt…

Welcome back, Jeff! Nice to see you again.

Acronyms

John VanDyk wonders why people use acronyms on the web although they can use all the space they want. I’ve also noticed that people use emoticons like ;-) on their web pages although they could use little pictures like clown: . It seems that they just tend to transfer their email or chat habits onto their web pages. Strange, but I have caught myself putting :-) in a written letter – sideways! I’ll really start worrying if I start to use acronyms in spoken conversations or double-clicking the button in the elevator…

Der Mensch ist ein Gewohnheitstier.

“I want to think M&Ms are better than money because you can eat them.” doublesmile:

John Marden points to this Letter of Resignation. Read it!

Weblog Manifestito

On Saturday, the Curmudgeon posted his Weblog Manifestito. Duncan added some comments about weblogs and their value to their readers.

August 7 2000

sfstories: by Derek Powazek.

I think this one says a lot about what the Internet means to me – and probably you, too. Generations. “Don’t undervalue the power of relationships that are established virtually.”

dodecahedron fractal: Dodecahedrons

Another link I found over at Zannah: Dodecahedrons.

I’m interested in them because I will probably write my thesis about polyhedra. The site also feates some nice fractals.

Economy of Words

  • Pythagorean theorem: 24 words.
  • The Lord’s prayer: 66 words.
  • Archimedes’ Principle: 67 words.
  • The 10 Commandments: 179 words.
  • The Gettysburg address: 286 words.
  • The Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words.
  • The US Government regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words.

Found at /usr/bin/girl. I wonder where she found it.

Sparsam?!

Kate led me to a page about a portable dishwasher. Nice little machine. I was checking out the details, and this one caught my eye: “Although it is small in size, it will wash up to 8 fullsize place settings using just under 5 gallons of water.”

5 gallons? Wait a second! That equals 18.95 litres – sounds like quite a lot of water to me. I checked out Miele and found that their full-size dishwashers’ economy program uses 13 litres (3.38 gallons) of water. Some of their machines can be programmed to wash dishes only in the upper part of the machine, and a non-economy program will use 11 litres (2.86 gallons) then. (Here’s the Miele USA page on dishwashers. I took the info from the German site mentioned above.)

I have to admit that Miele is a rather exclusive brand, but other dishwashers made in Germany don’t use more water than theirs. Germany has a system of classifying dishwashers, washing machines, fridges and freezers by the amount of energy (and water) they consume. “A” is best, “F” is worst. The Miele products are mostly rated “A”, but I’ve never seen any machines labeled worse than “C” in a shop.

Mira has written about this a couple of days ago. She talked about washing machines, but I think what she said applies to dishwashers as well.

Still waiting

Jeff has been hanging by a thread for four days now. Poor guy! Being without Internet access is about the worst thing I can imagine! Okay, not really – but once you’re addicted and have a weblog to look after…

After a week of vacation

Sheila is back. Sounds like she had a nice relaxing week. Now it’s back to work for her…

Oh yeah, Brent‘s back too, of course. But he wasn’t able to stay away from his weblog as long as Sheila, obviously. Sheila had a real W w/o C.

Wie geht das mit dem Kalender?

Also gut, aufgrund der vielen Nachfragen:

Für den Kalender gibt es ein Makro, {calendar}, und das kann man irgendwo im Template unterbringen. Eine Frage bei André ergab, daß es im Default Template nicht auftaucht.

Und Bastian, natürlich darfst Du das Wissen gern weiterverbreiten. Je mehr Leute das bei Dir lesen, desto weniger Leute nerven mich mit der Frage! clown: clown: clown:

August 6 2000

fray:

There are lots of great stories here, on beautifully designed pages. Here are the ones I especially liked:

Sad

Sandra and Garret‘s beloved Winslow is gone.

Weblog Rallye

Wenn der Schockwellenreiter und Martin mitmachen, will ich auch dabei sein!

Zur ersten (?!) irgendwie deutschen Weblog-Rallye kann man sich hier anmelden. Eigentlich wäre das doch auch was für Oliver, oder? Der scheint nur momentan ziemlich viel anderweitig zu tun zu haben und hat sein Weblog daher schon seit Eeewigkeiten nicht mehr aktualisiert…

Und weitere Kandidanten finden sich sicher auch noch hier auf Scotts Liste deutscher Weblogs.

Zu Deutsche.Weblogs.Com: Dort bin ich gerade Mitglied geworden, aber ich kann trotzdem nichts in der Discussion Group posten – äh, ich wollte sagen: einen Beitrag ins Diskussionsforum setzen. Wie hast Du das gemacht, Martin?