Category Archives: Fun

Google Nostalgia

Google turns ten and brings back their oldest available index, which is from 2001. If you search for my first name now, Andrea Electronics is the first hit. A search for my first name back in 2001 shows that back then a little weblog apparently was more popular than the electronics company. Ah, the good old times, back when most people didn’t even know what weblogs were…

This reminds me of some of the old-timers who have since disappeared… remember Behind the Curtain? Hi Alwin Hawkins, John van Dyk, Mike Donellan, Jeff Cheney, Netdyslexen et al! Any of you guys still around?

Link via MetaFilter.

Around the world

You know this website that lets you check all the states and countries you’ve visited and shows them on a map? Well, Douwe Osinga has improved the interface since I’ve last been there, and I’ve visited another country and a few more states, so here are my updated maps as of August 2008.


visited 16 states (7.11%)

Not very surprisingly, I’ve mostly been to European countries. But I’ve also visited two countries in Africa as well as the US and Canada in Northern America.

In the US, I’ve mostly been to the Western states. (New York and Kentucky may not really count because I only changed planes there and therefore just saw the airport.)


visited 13 states (26%)

Create your own visited map of The World or of The United States!

Uke!

Garret (of dangerousmeta! fame) links to a New York Times article about the comeback of the ukulele: Those four irresistible strings.

I’m actually a big fan of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (I wish they’d do more concerts in Germany!). André gave me a ukulele for my birthday this year, so Ukulele Hunt (site mentioned in the NY Times article) comes in handy. And speaking of handy: When I got my ukulele, I found a little film on Youtube that shows how to tune it: Ukulele Tuning – Beginner Lesson.

I taught myself how to play chords on the guitar and got reasonably good at it when I was about sixteen, but I haven’t played in a long time. Now that I’ve got a ukulele I agree with Jim Beloff:

“If you were a poor guitar player,“ he said, “you suddenly become a pretty good uke player.“

Mentos Geysers

I guess that by now everybody knows that you can build a very sticky geyser by dropping Mentos into a bottle of Coke. Some of my students and I even had a lot of fun – um, I meant we did some very serious scientific experiments with carbonated beverages and mints with a porous surface in a science class just before the summer break last year. However, our experiments were quite tame compared to these…

Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz have taken the experiment to the next level – “with over 250 geysers of soda. And this time they’re linked together in one giant chain reaction! A clever mechanism harnesses the power of one geyser of Diet Coke to drop the Mentos into the next bottle. So just like dominos, all they have to do is start the first one, and the rest is Diet Coke & Mentos history!” Watch it here.

(Siehe auch hier im Archiv.)