I’m calling today “T-Shirt Appreciation Day” because I have a bunch of shirts to post and “Shirt of the Day” works questionably if I’m posting more than one shirt a day…
Now, onto the show…
Buy this one for $19. It’s a hard truth, but a truth no less.
I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books as a young’un. Though, being a Campbell, I was a pretty bad cheat and used to do them backwards after a couple of frustrating deaths.
Perhaps I would have made better choices had I studied the structure of the books in depth. Like this person has.
In scanning over the distribution of colors in this plot, one clear pattern is a the gradual decline in the number of endings. The earliest books (in the top row) are awash in reds and oranges, with a healthy number of ‘winning’ endings mixed in. Later cyoa books tended to favor a single ‘best’ ending (see CYOA 44 & 53).
And here’s something I did not know, and indeed it contains a life lesson for those of us who like to cheat…
The one outlier is the catastrophic ending seen in the third row from the bottom. This was a punishment page that could only be reached by cheating. Unlike most other endings in the book it does not offer to let you continue the story from a few pages back but instead calls you a cheater and leaves you with no choice but to start over from the beginning.
Apparently the books evolved to become more difficult over time. As indicated by this graph…
Read the rest of the research. It’s interesting.
You wouldn’t read about it in the papers. A guy is trying to get “hello” removed from the lexicon.
If you’re going to drink crap you might as well drink it from a toilet…
Table Tennis hasn’t been a bastion of innovation. Much. The basic gameplay is essentially the same as it was when invented. Although, I was in a sports shop yesterday and I noticed the handles had a little slide out adjustable thing that is meant to change the amount of control a player can exert on the ball. Interesting. And yet the really innovative players are doing away with handles altogether…
Here it is in action…
Are you sick of direct mail? I am. Not quite as sick as these guys who have produced a 16 page pamphlet to stuff into the reply paid envelopes they get sent in the mail.
Here are some samples from the brochure.
Things get a little crazy from there… but it all ends well…
While we’re on the subject of robots… here’s a cool little piece of trivia.
A robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts–barely enough to run a dim light bulb.
If ever the Decepticons do attack you can rest assured we have friendly robots everywhere that will no doubt leap to our defence. They’ll be hiding though. They’re very sneaky, and all over the place. Where you’d least expect them.
Like playing pool…
Or making pancakes…
…Playing volleyball…
They might be packing stuff in a warehouse.
Or taking out the trash…
With all these powers combined and built into a body like this one they’ll be all set to protect us from the nasty aliens.
This is perhaps the coolest fancy dress costume since the last Transformers costume I posted…
You have quite possibly seen this video of the Mythbusters guys painting the Mona Lisa in a blink with a paintball turret gun…
But I’m hoping you haven’t seen this rendering of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portrait already…
And I posted this a while ago, but it’s equally impressive – though not strictly a piece of “paintball art”… in fact it’s got nothing to do with paintball. But it is the Mona Lisa.
Mmm. Tasty Tasty Ghost.
And on a shirt too…
One more for the arsenal of dangerous projects to try at home… And it’s a pretty guaranteed ace in the hole for my next game of table tennis against dad… if it doesn’t wreck the table.
This thing shoots table tennis balls through solid chipboard (oxymoron alert).
From CrunchGear.
These are some nice ads from Colgate. Nice and sinister.
Colgate normally gives out small product samples at annual events like “Oral Health Month” to remind target consumers, especially kids, to take better care of their teeth after eating sweets. This method does not drive strong results as most consumers tend to forget the message, even if they have collected the samples. Instead of giving away product samples, ice cream and cotton candy were given out. The stick carrying the ice cream and cotton candy carries a hidden message. Once consumers are done the message printed on the tip of the stick shaped like a toothbrush reveals “Don’t Forget” with the Colgate logo. This simple message effectively reminded consumers to brush their teeth.
