Fun toy: Scroll around the globe and eavesdrop on local streaming radio. Language lovers will have a great time. Music lovers will be intensely frustrated by the realization that most of the world now listens to the same crap we do, albeit sometimes in their native languages. But there may be rewards for the persistent.

Artificial intelligence generates inspirational memes and posters.

Ancient Greek punishments teach typing.

Yeah.

Fantasy birding: sadly nothing to do with simorghs or war shrikes or the like. Valuable tool for education and public engagement, or yet another death knell for our relationship with the non-human world? I have my suspicions, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

Portmanteau generator

A winvention (yes, one of its own).

Here's an amusing toy: I Write Like. Drop a few paragraphs of your text in there, and it claims to analyze it and tell you what author matches your style. Of course, I seldom write like anything at all these days, but that's beside the point. My old Illinois River piece yielded up David Foster Wallace (doesn't mean much to me); my more recent discussion of tamarisk beetles gave Nabokov (thanks, but I don't think so); but my Gila River trip report yielded what is surely the correct answer (Iä ! Iä !)

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

The first five paragraphs of Call of Cthulhu gets you Arthur C. Clark. A few more paragraphs got us there, but "cyclopean" was a dead giveaway.

Via Atomic Nerds (sorry about the Atwood).

Chas found it first and the Atomic Nerds personalized it, so in the interest of continuing Barbie ethnography, I'll offer some more easily overlooked specimens. Santa Fe has any number of them, of course, but particularly noteably to this blog's readership is

St. John's College [Santa Fe] Barbie: Available in a wide variety of hairstyles and body types, this Barbie's accessories include a bong and hardcover copies of Plato's Republic and the Fagles Iliad. Optional conversion kit to Eastern Orthodoxy available.

Española Barbie, Alternative Model: Includes long flowing robes and turban. Most commonly used with Santa Fe Whole Foods Market playset. Ken includes a dagger and a security business.

Truchas Barbie: Commonly mistaken for Española Barbie, Trucheña Barbie's accessories include an elk rifle, several yard appliances, stray livestock, and a kit to sabotage Santa Fe and Taos Barbies' vehicles when parked at local trailheads.

Steve is hereby challenged to offer up Catron County Barbie. Anyone else? I'd say glaring omissions include Tierra Amarilla, Roswell and Gallup Barbies.

Why has no one told me about this?

"OCW is a free publication of course materials used at MIT. Get lecture notes, problem sets, labs and more. Watch lecture videos and demonstrations. Study a wide variety of subjects."

Robots vs. pirates.

-it’s not as stupid, or unlikely, as it sounds. Piracy has exploded in the waters near Somalia, where this past week United States warships have fired on two pirate skiffs, and are currently in pursuit of a hijacked Japanese-owned vessel. At least four other ships in the region remain under pirate control, and the problem appears to be going global: The International Maritime Bureau is tracking a 14-percent increase in worldwide pirate attacks this year.

...

For years now, law enforcement agencies across the high seas have proposed robotic boats, or unmanned surface vessels (USVs), as a way to help deal with 21st-Century techno Black Beards. The Navy has tested at least two small, armed USV demonstrators designed to patrol harbors and defend vessels. And both the Navy and the Coast Guard have expressed interest in the Protector, a 30-ft.-long USV built by BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Israeli defense firm RAFAEL.

A vocabulary game worth the candle. I can't seem to break 50.

Further developments in inimical technology.

Ark Trading Inc, an Osaka-based trading company, has started selling the NANDA Clocky, an innovative alarm clock that runs and hides from its sleepy owners as they attempt to turn it off.

Is this the sort of behavior we really want to encourage in our fledgling AIs?

This is one of the few cases where the term 'sixth sense' is not entirely misused.

Reporter Quinn Norton, who had a magnet implanted into her finger to allow her to 'feel' magnetic fields has finally had it removed - returning her to the normal world of the 'five senses'.

Very cool, but wouldn't something external have worked as well?

Via Eve Tushnet.

Neal Stephenson got me thinking about phosphorus; and the Internet was there for me.

As is before shewed, take Urine well putrefied in a Tub, exposed to the Air for seven Weeks, all one as you do when you're to make a Spirit of it; the Spirit being drawn, or rather the whole of it being evaporated to the consistance of Honey, in which lies the Fosperus; but the Art is somewhat difficult to get it from thence, in two cases, the one is in making choice of a proper Agent to be mixed therewith, and the other is the exact regiment of the Fire.

I cannot, however, track down an online edition of Boyle's The aerial noctiluca: or some new phoenomena, and a process of a factitious self-shining substance.

Please don't try the last experiment on the above website. There exist easier ways.

Stupid, stupid, toys.

Shield with sword blade, gauntlet, sword catchers, and lantern from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. This unusual Italian creation seeks to combine many offensive and defensive capabilities into one package. It dates to the first half of the 16th century and combine a shield with multiple blades and an armoured gauntlet.