Give your meals a blast with this pepper mill.
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
Entiecing attiere
Finding the right outfit for a formal occasion is a tough ask. Especially if you’re a function over form type of person. Lucky I’m here to help – with these two suggestions for your next work party… one for the clumsy eater and the other for the beer drinker.
Magic fail
Or is it? At the very least it made me laugh.
A question of gravity
In the spirit of pointless science here’s an exploration of the gravity of Super Mario’s world in each Mario release.
First, you must find the time it took Mario to fall from the edge of the ledge to the ground in each game. To do this, we opened each clip in Quicktime movie player, and using the frame by frame option, found the total number of frames it took Mario to fall. We then used the formula:
Time = (Number of Frames) / (Frame Rate)
To find the time of each of Mario’s falls. Once we knew the time, we needed to figure out the distance Mario fell in each game. We used a screen shot of Mario next to the ledge he fell from in each game, and found the height of Mario and the ledge in pixels. According to Wikipedia, Mario is “a little over five feet tall.”, so we used 5 feet, or 1.524 meters, as Mario’s height.
Turns out they’re getting closer and closer to real world conditions – which is a shame – because Mario’s success depends on his ability to leap tall pipes in a single bound. Read the rest of the study here.
“We determined that, generally speaking, the gravity in each Mario game, as game hardware has increased, is getting closer to the true value of gravity on earth of 9.8 m/s2. However, gravity, even on the newest consoles, is still extreme. According to Wikipedia, a typical person can withstand 5 g before losing consciousness, and all but the very latest of Mario games have gravity greater than this. Also, with gravity that great, it is a wonder Mario can perform such feats as leaping almost 5 times his own body height!”
Spiderman Strikes Again
David Thorne, from 27bslash6, is up to his old antics once again. This time he’s terrorising a real estate agent. And I think we can all agree that real estate agents deserve it. Particularly because inspections are a pain and their need to come back again and again borders on voyeurism…
So I enjoyed this…
The email exchange after that report begins like this…
From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 30 September 2009 6.04pm
To: Peter Williams
Subject: Inspection Report
Dear Peter,
Thankyou for the surprise inspection and invitation to participate in the next. I appreciate you underlining the text at the bottom of the page which I would otherwise have surely mistaken for part of the natural pattern in the paper. I was going to clean the apartment but had so many things on my ‘to do’ list that I decided to treat them all equally and draw pictures of sharks instead. I have attached one for your honest appraisal.
I have read through your list of chores and intend to rectify the situation by wrapping my entire body in eighteen rolls of super absorbent Thick’n’thirsty® paper towels, hosing down the apartment, then rolling around on the floor and rubbing myself up and down walls. I will cover the more stubborn marks with Liquid Paper. I will also get back to you in regards to the premises being inspected in another two weeks, my agreement to do so will depend on availability and not wanting to.
Regards, David.
And it ends like this… read everything in between here. His site contains a fair bit of material that may offend though, so I wouldn’t click around too much if you’re the easily offended type…
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 02 October 2009 10.36am
To: Peter Williams
Subject: Nom nom nom
Hide your light in a bottle
You can let your little light shine – quite literally – with this blood powered lamp. It’s meant to teach you the value of energy. Some sort of lesson that all energy use comes at a cost. It’s cool. Science with a message.
Here’s a video of the thing in action…
Blood Lamp from miket on Vimeo.
Thanks to Ali for the tip.
Super Mario Clock
What time is it when the big hand points to Flower Power Mario and the little hand points to Mario64?
You can answer this question for your friends, countrymen or children if you purchase this clock from etsy.
Mac time
I love clever billboards. This one from McDonalds is one of the cleverest I’ve seen for a while. Their outdoor advertising department is doing a good job…
Design brief
I have been doing a bit of web design stuff for work and on my blog for a while now – and I still find CSS glitches in my ad hoc approach to changing things.
Here are three essential tools for making web design using CSS an easier job.
- This Smashing Magazine CSS Tutorial is a must
- Firebug – the Firefox extension that allows you to chop and change your code and watch what it does to your page as you do it.
- A good CSS editor program (here are ten suggestions) takes out a lot of the grunt work.
Update – here are some cliched features to avoid. And my favourites listed in order of how annoying I find them…
- Autoplaying music
- Introduction movies with no skip button
- Comic Sans
- Overuse of stock images
- Animated Globes
One that wasn’t on the list that I find particularly annoying is talking ads that don’t pop up but move across the page. I guess people are trying to prove that they’re tech savvy and stuff…
Am I missing anything design people?
Gold diggers
We (Australians) ain’t nothing but a bunch of gold diggers. It turns out Australians are all rejoicing about our golden soil, and the national wealth for work equation.
Australians, according to the Economist, have the most positive self image.
It’s with good reason because figures just released show that we’re also the second most desirable country to live in, based on the range of factors considered by the United Nations Human Development Index… behind Norway.
Coffee chemistry
Wired has a fascinating look at the chemicals at play in your daily espresso.
Here’s my favourite part of the chemical equation (if you thought caffeine you were wrong):
Trigonelline
Chemically, it’s a molecule of niacin with a methyl group attached. It breaks down into pyridines, which give coffee its sweet, earthy taste and also prevent the tooth-eating bacterium Streptococcus mutans from attaching to your teeth. Coffee fights the Cavity Creeps.
YouTube Tuesday: Kid ay?
If the North Queensland lifestyle had an iconic album it would not be Kid A – despite the reference to an endemic verbal tick. Ay.
Pitchfork has just listed the top 20 albums of the decade. And Kid A was number one. Here’s a nice little paragraph from their review.
“Radiohead were not only among the first bands to figure out how to use the Internet, but to make their music sound like it, and they kicked off this ridiculously retro decade with the rare album that didn’t seem retro. Kid A— with its gorgeously crafted electronics, sparkling production, and uneasy stance toward the technology it embraces completely– feels like the Big Album of the online age.”
And here’s a live version of the first song from the album…