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This is the place for ToothyWikizens to post links to the most comical, controversial or otherwise linkworthy sites (well, usually pages) that you've found out there on the rest of the web.
However! If you add a link, please put a bit of description next to it
- not just "must see" or equivalent but an actual vague indication of the contents.  Otherwise, it's just a list of links with people going "Huh?" afterwards.

SeeAlso BBCHeadlines, NetQuizzes, FreeGames



[Tesla Museum] An indiegogo fundraiser to buy the site of Nikolai Tesla's final laboratory, called Wardenclyffe, and create a museum to the creator of Alternative current, Tesla coils - and very nearly death rays!
The original target was $850,000, with New York State offering to match it.
The current total stands at $1,082,399 - and as of this post theres still 36 days left. --Macloud


[Sartre vs Camus] - Philosophical RapBattle?! --DouglasReay


[The 5 Best Toys of All Time]. --AlexChurchill


[BBC Preview of The One Ronnie], with Ronnie Corbett proving he's still got it. Extremely funny and well done. (YouTube?, needs sound) --CH


[Fancy a free router?] SamKnows? appears to be a consumer information and benchmarking website for broadband. They have a sole contract with Ofcom to provide broadband measurement data. They will send you a Netgear router with a speed-measuring suite installed if you sign up to their performance-measuring campaign, and your data is available for you to peruse (and, if need be, complain to your ISP about). Do note that they estimate their router downloads and upload about 2GB each way per month. --CH, who has been trying to work out why his broadband will cost so much at his new house; the answer appears to be that he's connected to an exchange serving under 2,000 premises, and which hasn't therefore been [LLU]d by anyone. This is compared to his old property, which was connected to an exchange serving about 25,000 premises.


[What totally inappropriate background music can do for you] (Youtube). This may be less funny to people who didn't grow up watching Ski Sunday (and whose brains do not therefore have strong associations for Pop Looks Bach).


[Modernizr], a rather nifty-looking lightweight JavaScript library which adds a bunch of CSS classes to your HTML element, depending on support for various progressive (CSS3, HTML5) features, thereby allowing graceful fallback.

Additional interesting links onwards from there:


Reminding me of my "hardware loving" days [6502 Javascript visualiser] --DDD
Whoah - that is incredible! --MoonShadow


Very pleasing [optical illusion] (YouTube?, no sound needed). --CH


[Science is Vital] - petition not to reduce science funding --SunKitten


[Climbing a very tall tower] --RobHu


[Jenga for artists] nice pictures --DouglasReay


["Dilbert - It's not curable he will become an engineer"]  -- DDD


["A Thinking Ape's Critique of Trans-Simianism"] :)


[Play Go in SVG] would be  great if moonshadow or another could fix SameBoard? for ko retaking! client-server with database backend, chat etc. due soon --Chad
You need to completely separate updating the displayed board from updating the internal representation of the board. The functions such as DoCaptures? that update the internal representation should never have side effects that change what's rendered; instead, after a move has been accepted, the visible board should be updated in one go. Not only will everything then work correctly, but it will be possible to perform more complicated calculations on the board position (for scoring, AI...) while keeping the code sane, and have the board state come from a remote source without having to rewrite all the display code. [My implementation] actually goes to some length to do things this way: notice how Redraw() is the only function that updates the displayed board in any way, and Redraw() never changes the board state. --MoonShadow
these comments appreciated thanks. hack in place updates twice once  for valid captures, once on play, my apologies, logic may yet be broken....  when you have time, cleaner version would be very much appreciated. --Chad
Uh... Is that a very impolite request for MoonShadow to fix your application?  --Vitenka
V: it's not quite as out of the blue as it looks, we've been in email discussion. - MoonShadow
~ playable on iTouch, almost instant, can a few more cycles be removed? --Chad
Could you please explain what newMove is for, and what the intent of if (captures!=1){newMove=[-1,-1];} is? - MoonShadow


[8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite of What You Think]. "Only one man on Earth is death metal enough to have an inverted cross carved into his own throne..."


[Studio Ghibli RPG looks AMAZING] ^^ --RobHu


[1]England vs USA, now in Lego --DDD


[Julian Huppert's first speech in parliament] --RobHu


[BoobQuake] - because the most effective response to idiot fanatics is to make fun of them. Follow [here on twitter].--Pallando


[Award winning complaint letter] to Virgin Atlantic.  I'm sure I've come across it before, but it's of sufficient quality to bump it up the agenda once again (says he, trying to avoid his homework...) --MJ


[Timelapse photography of the night sky as the earth rotates] - a 1 minute video. I particularly like seeing the Milky Way in the section from 0:21 to 0:36. --AC


[Classified material wiki]. "Endoscopic examination of SCP-108 reveals that the area accessible via the subject's nostrils is not the human nasal cavity, but rather a bunker system of Nazi German construction dedicated to the production and maintenance of WW2-era Messerschmitt Me 262 fighters..."


[Goodbye life] - "Civilization V: what we know so far."
Want. --CH


[Planetocopia]. A variety of speculations about how Earth could have been, if something had been different. What if the Earth's axis was through the South Atlantic and the Sea of Japan? Visit [Seapole, a warm flooded world]. What would the world look like if you inverted height above sea level, so deep-sea trenches become mountain ranges and vice versa? Take a look at [Inversia].


[Implicit Egotism in Major Life Decisions]. An article describing ten studies, all of which suggest that people are more likely to choose careers, places to live, and marriage partners with names similar to the person's own name. Provides a variety of other interesting or thought-provoking tidbits, such as:
during the 2000 presidential campaign, people whose last names began with B and G were more likely to contribute to the election funds of Bush and Gore, respectively.
students who thought carefully about reasons before choosing specific classes were later less satisfied with these classes.


[This is a bit Yes Minister] is it not?


[Big Cat Studio] - cuuute big cats, some cuddling people :)


[Oddly specific] - photos of, mostly, curiously specific signage. Quite amusing. --CH


[Buy 'bad code offsets']. Like carbon offsetting, but for bad code! --RobHu


[.-.] and [>:|]--RobHu


[Data from the World of Goo Sale] - the developers of World of Goo put it on sale for whatever people wanted to pay for it, and publish the sales data on how much people chose to pay. All sorts of interesting data, including 10% of the respondents saying they'd previously pirated the game and now wanted to pay something for it. --AlexChurchill


[Cruel] reality show episode. Only the Japanese are crazy enough to do this prank. Americans might be crazy enough, but the guy being pranked would probably be carrying, which would complicate matters. --Admiral


[Meerkats] anyone? --MJ


[Astonishing real-looking origami insects]


[Want to drive a Formula One car?]  (requires Flash, mostly interesting for the driving challenge which comes after the three questions).


[Tesla coil] hooked up to a keyboard, playing the Doctor Who theme without the need for loudspeakers. Oh, and a cool portable faraday cage. --Admiral


Breaking news! Someone at Google obviously has a [sense of humour]. --Admiral
Why the lmgtfy? I presume that what I see at http://www.google.com/search?q=recursion is the joke. --PT


[Video of Feynman lecturing] --DR


It's a web comic, but if you have been following the news about Microsoft's new Bing search engine, these pages are just excellent: [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]


[7] The ultimate answer to anyone posting anything on the net. - DDD


[iTunes U] - University courses, from Cambridge and elsewhere, in video and audio form, for your iPhone or iPod.  For example, [itms://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects?/Core?.woa/Browse?/researchchannel.org.1795918000.01795918006.1795787206?i=1394082387 Sid Meier on Games and Learning]--DR


[Yingzi] - if English were written like Chinese.


[Yet another evil flash game] --qqzm
That's awesome. Such a delightfully simple concept, but many levels. And I didn't believe them about the boss: more fool me :) --AC


[Grow Tower] - the latest in the "Grow" series of Flash puzzles.
With gratuitous dinosaurs. --DR
Most of the Grow games have gratuitous dinosaurs :) Note also that as well as the "original" Grow ["Grow v3"], [Grow RPG], [Grow Cube] and [Grow Tower], there's also re-released versions of the earlier games,  [Grow v2] and [Grow v1] (which is rather different in style and has a tree of routes and endings; look for the underground city!) --AlexChurchill


[Evil flash game], courtesy of Tsunami. --MoonShadow
Good idea, badly implemented. It should be about thinking and aiming but instead it's about hoping you don't get three piles of 10 or so additional bubbles in a row blocking everything you've been planning. And you have to give it your Facebook details if you want to see your personal highscore. Ugh. --PT
There's a trade-off between thinking and firing before the bit you want to hit turns out of sight.  Planning is heavily overrated in columns-alikes.  --Vitenka
That trade-off's fine, and not what I'm talking about. My complaint is with the trigger for sending additional stuff. It seems to be that every time you fire it checks if rand() < CONST and if it is then it sends more bubbles. If it sent stuff every N turns, or every N points, or even at random but with a more consistent spacing (if (fireStuffDelay?-- == 0) { fireStuff(); fireStuffDelay? = 3 + rand(2);}) then it would be more a game of skill. The way it's done now feels like lazy design. --PT
It didn't feel that way to me.  To me it seemed that it fired stuff more after you'd failed to blow stuff up.  Miss again and it fired more stuff, and so on.  --Vitenka
It fires stuff at precisely determined times. Look at the bottom left corner; you see six grey circles. Every time you fire a bubble that *doesn't* get rid of any bubbles, one of those disappears. When they're all gone, you get crap fired at you and five grey circles come back; then four, then three etc. When it gets to none you get crap fired at you twice in a row then all six back. - MoonShadow
Interface reading failure on my part, but at least I kinda figured it out :)  --Vitenka
Thanks, MS. It's not an interface reading failure but an interface failure. One line in the quick instructions would be all it takes. --PT


[The Lego Gasman cometh] - Flanders & Swann in Lego. Some nice touches. --CH


[US teen clocks up 14,528 text messages in one month]. --Admiral


GameOfTheMoment?: [Evacuation] - puzzle game to eject aliens into space by toggling groups of airlock doors. It's quite unforgiving: let just one of the red-suited guys (officers) die and that's game over: although you can replay the level you died on unlimited times, you can't progress any further, and have to restart from level one if you want to progress further. AlexChurchill's current highscore is 512, which was around level 17 or so.
I get a grey rectangle. According to the Javascript in the page it needs Flash 6, and I have Flash 9. Anyone else with Flash 9 able to play it? --PT
I'm playing it with Flash 9 inside Google Chrome. --AC
Odd, if you've no javascript it just runs.  Are you sure you don't have flash10?  There's a particularly amusing bug in some common validation code that only checks the first digit and think you have flash1...  --Vitenka
It must be something to do with the javascript or Flashblocker. (Should have mentioned that, but it's never caused me problems in the past so it slipped my mind). [The swf] works fine. I'm ambivalent about the game. Random level generation is good in principle, but in this implementation it sometimes leads to a level 10 which is easier than level 4. --PT
I found that the 'you get more crew members when you do well' balanced that out nicely.  Although it stops giving you then after a while.  --Vitenka
Yes, if you kill off everyone but your captain before anyone else gets promoted, it gets easy, and you can just go on earning five points over and over. --SGB
That... wasn't what I meant.  I meant that it gets harder to save everyone because it gives you more everyone's to save as time goes on.  --Vitenka  (And, conversely, if you do badly it gives you fewer to save)
Yeah, the 'yes' was to your "although..." -- SGB



[Numericana] - for MathematicallyMindedPeople


GameOfTheMoment?: [Grid] - rotate sections of pipe to form a complete grid, but only ones that have power. AlexChurchill finished it in the end, with a score of 67852.


A reporter [throws his shoes at Bush]. Why is this on SiteOfTheMoment? Because of the sheer shock of Bush [responding in a reasonable manner]. --Admiral


The [Porpoise Driven Life] (Video). --Admiral


[Wonderful art made from food]. I think I've seen some other works by the same artist, maybe on SOTM or maybe just someone emailed them to me. --Rachael


[Yet another evilly addictive flash game] --qqzm
Yeah, it's good, but it needs a whole load more levels. --Admiral
I agree. It's good, but rather too short. That one diamond level took lots of tries, but apart from that it needs more levels. --AC
...Which, it turns out, can be obtained at the [Fold] link. --AC


[Most amazing cakes in the world ever]


Thieves [steal] 200-year-old church! --Admiral


[500 exabytes of information in a raindrop!] Interesting (and quite mind-boggling) comparison of how much information various things in the real world contain. (Not sure SOTM is the best place to post it, but wasn't sure where was better; suggestions welcome.) --Rachael


[Weird experiment] - play [the unintelligible distorted speech], then play [the original clear speech], then replay the distorted speech and suddenly you can make out the words! (Note: Don't start with the first one on the page; in that one, the distortion isn't very significant and the distorted speech is comprehensible even the first time round.) --Rachael
And turn down your speaker volume; for me, certainly, the distorted voices were quite piercing. Also fun. --Requiem


[Bathsheba] - lady who creates artworks using Mathematica, then has then turned into metal sculpture via 3D printing or [lasers].  Pretty! --DR




['suppressed' research].  I particularly liked [Dr. Masaru Emoto: Messages from Water], who taped words like "Love" and "Hate" to bottles of water, then froze them and took pictures of the resulting crystals.  Very pretty. I will be so disappointed if it turns out to be like [homeopathic crystal healing]. --DR
[This] seems appropriate. - MoonShadow


[Game] to test "the ability to notice that things might be just a little off square, off centre, or not quite straight". Rachael scored an average error of 5.41, and predicts AlexChurchill will do very well.
Vitenka got a perfect right angle, and stopped there; not wanting to jinx it.
6.76, with the middle of my three batches the best. But I suspect I'd do better at home with my nice, smooth optical mouse... --CH
Indeed I do. 3.65 - or 2.89 if I ignore a disastrous last round. --CH
SF scored 4.21, which apparently makes me modal.
M-A: 3.88.
AlexChurchill: 3.60. Best at the right-angle, worst at the parallelogram.
SGB: 3.11.  Best at the midpoint.  Worst at anything the third time, I was getting a bit bored.
Garbled: 5.22. I did get a couple of 0 -0.4s


[Light Bot] (Flash game) - Program the bot to light the blue squares.  The difficulty curve can be roughly described as an open field with a cliff face (level 10) on one end.  Levels 11 & 12 are tricky but not as hard as 10. --K



[EepyBird's Sticky Note Experiments] (video; sound not required). I know it's unlike me to post a video, but... With nothing except a good idea, a helping of creativity, and a very large amount of PostItNotes? and patience, EepyBird? turn a boring office into a colourful and animated one. --AC
That's very pretty. It reminds me of the advert (for a TV, or a printer, or something) that was in the cinema about a year ago, with all the coloured balls bouncing down the street. --Rachael


[One two three four five]
not a very informative description.  what is it, that I should want to watch it ?
It is a YouTube? video of a portion of Sesame Street, teaching the number 12 by means of a slightly trippy pinball machine. --CH
That answers the first half... --SGB



['how old is your brain']
1. Touch 'start'
2. Wait for 3, 2, 1.
3. Memorize the numbers' positions on the screen, then click the circle from the SMALLEST number to the BIGGEST number.
4. At the end of game, the computer will tell you the age of your brain.
- Possibly this should be in NetQuizzes but it seems more like a flash game. --Pallando, who would be interested to know how much people improve their score between their 1st and 2nd attempt, and their 2nd and 3rd attempt.
36,34,32 --Pallando
25,35,36 --Edwin
22,... --ChrisHowlett
37    --Garbled
20 --Androidkiller
37,33,26 --M-A: First time round, I didn't realise exactly what to do (I've now corrected your instructions).  My biggest problem was actually seeing all the numbers in time - when they were spread out, I couldn't read them all quickly enough.
I think that's the point. How good are you at instantly perceiving a load of stuff? I think that's what it's trying to measure, not your ability to rank numbers in order... --Rachael
34,27,27 --Rachael - I think there's too much randomness to measure meaningful improvement across tries. It seems to only count how many you got right or wrong, not how close you were. If you only missed one number, that ought to count for something. And if you get a 6-number or 7-number round right, that ought to count for more than a 3 or 4.

Thank you.  Those numbers bear out what I thought - that there is a fairly large practice effect involved.  --Pallando


More [steampunky goodness]


[The evolutionary psychology of hugs] - I'd nominate this for research of the year --Pallando
Well, if the award is for stating the bloody obvious, sure. People tend to be nicer when they are happy and relaxed? Stop the presses!
I think this is worth a discussion on TheScienceOfHealth... --ElliottBelser


In a similar vein to fantastic contraptions, [Magic Pen]. --Admiral


[Garfield Lost In Translation] - Garfield cartoons where the text has been translated into Chinese and back to English.


[Fantastic Contraption].  Pointless but addictive flash game... --DDD
Discussion snipped to FantasticContraption


[Harry Potter theme tune in "(almost) every style known to man"]. Needs sound, obviously...


["If you ever doubted, even for a second, that non-Newtonian goo (e.g., cornstarch and water) is from a totally different (and infinitely preferable) universe, behold!"]
Sadly, "We're sorry, this video is no longer available." Has been removed from YouTube? for some reason. However... [it is still here...] --jvictor


[Where we got A, B, C from] (and [here]) - Ox, House, Boomerang, Fish or Door.  I thought that was really cool --DR


[The putty puzzle] - quite a lot of fun, puzzle game.
Can anyone else run this? I get an error in the Java console that it can't load the levels. --PT
Much of ToothyChat was enjoying it.  --Vitenka
The LWJGL version at http://www.cokeandcode.com/demos/putty3/putty.html still works. Thanks to AC for discovering this. --PT


[Freebase] - Possibly this should be CategoryTimeSink.  Think cross betweeen WikiPedia and [IMDB] --DR


[Judge issues arrest warrant for "Darth Vader"] and says "I hope the force will soon be with him." --Admiral


[Live Earthquake monitoring in the UK]


[Patent application] with a twist. --Admiral


[You have to burn the rope] Short indie game that is a critique of games in general, or something.  --Vitenka (not the best indie game I found, but a good jumping off point)




[Phorm tester].


[London teen orders "cab, innit"], doesn't quite get what she expected. --Admiral


[Google Image Labeler]. Kind of on-line articulate. SF's best is 1660, you should be able to beat that easily enough with a co-operative partner...if any exist.
Do you mean on-line Compatibility?? --PT
Whilst it looks more like Compatability?, playing it like Articulate is the way to score points. --SF
You don't get to choose your partner, to avoid gaming the system.  So you can't score based on knowledge about your partner.  However, there is no announced penalty for giving absolutely ridiculous descriptors (or descriptors your partner fails to give).  So to score maximum, submit the entire dictionary for  each image.  --Vitenka  (And if your partner uses this same strategy, you score enough to make them change the rules)
Except that you only get points for one match, so submitting the entire dictionary gets you 140 points for "aardvark" and nothing else. Unless you try and submit the entire dictionary as one entry in which case you run out of time. --SF


Simple, quick, addictive [Flash game] where you have to fly a helicopter as far as you can without crashing. Only one, binary, degree of freedom in the controls. My pathetic personal best: 386. --Rachael
646 by the technique of staying at the top, as it takes more response time to get it up that to let it drop --Androidkiller
Almost 1000. I'm sure I could beat it, but I find the game rather boring. --PT
1564 --Garbled


What happens when you combine an upbeat folk song, a 12 year old and [Flash].  Very catchy, needs sound... --M-A


Two games that play with impossible physics in different ways: [Fez], a "2D platformer" which takes place in a 3D world where you can selectively ignore one of the dimensions. Watch the video for the consequences.
[Echochrome], another game which determines where objects are in relation to each other based on the camera angle: here you can set any 3D angle and have the laws of the world adjust appropriately, but the game itself looks less interesting due to being wireframe black-and-white rather than a colourful platform world.


[Christvertising] Needs sound and a sense of humour --Tsunami


[Celebrated author offers insightful analysis of the superhero costume] - discussion moved to Fandom




[Scary] [2] little tidbit of Belorussian local news. According to Russian news sources, equipment to stop the vehicle was available (strips of spikes one can lay across the road to puncture the tires) but not deployed due to past issues with the inspectorate being sued for damage to cars stopped in this way. --MoonShadow




[Paul Krugman's 1978 Theory of Interstellar Trade] --B
"Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved... This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."


[Interesting essay] (pdf) about what's wrong with the teaching of maths. --Rachael
Nice metaphor about teaching of music, but goes a bit downhill from there.  I disagree with him about algebra not being important for most people - I think really understanding it changes how people think. --DR
Very interesting, indeed. I agree with quite a bit of what he says. I particularly like this exchange:
"Then what should we do with young children in math class?" / "Play games! Teach them Chess and Go, Hex and Backgammon, Sprouts and Nim, whatever. Make up a game. Do puzzles. Expose them to situations where deductive reasoning is necessary."
But I disagree with his assertion that "you can't teach teaching" on page 11. "Teaching means openness and honesty, an ability to share excitement, and a love of learning" may be true, but some of those things can be taught, and plenty of things about clear communication can be taught. --AC


[Scarily impressive origami] --Rachael


[Old games, sabotaged].  Some jokes, some 'what if we make this very slight tweak to the gameplay'.  Interesting and/or funny.  --Vitenka


[Passage], a simple pixel-art game with a message. Takes 5 minutes to play. Play it once or twice, then read the Creator's Statement on the webpage.
Be aware that up and down are viable directions --K (who somehow managed to miss this on his first play-through)
The Linux build script seems to be borked. --PT
WorksForMe? - what error do you get? --Admiral



[Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, (1956) Miner, Horace] - a very revealing article published in the journal American Anthropologist about a primitive society --DR
[More about the Nacirema]
I do quite like those kinds of articles, and I hadn't seen that particular one before. (I dispute that 1956 is "of the moment".) The second one's not as good. --Rachael
Clearly it's a particularly timeless moment. --SF
I found the first one far better than the second, which was a bit too obvious (and the fakey names too grating) Both are fun though.  --Vitenka


[Cracked toys from around the world]. Yes, most of them are from Japan. I think my favourite is the first on the list, actually, although the plush 'pee&poo' come very close - SunKitten


[See how long you can survive without hitting the blue squares]. My record is 16.4 seconds so far. --Rachael
Hee. After a few 12-13s, I've managed 18.9 several times, and 19.2 once. Fun. --AC
Heh. There's a version of this in one of the Wii games that StuartFraser owns. It's much easier with a Wiimote than with a mouse (or maybe the ghosts move more slowly in that than the squares do here). --SF
DR's best score is 22.551 using the route BC, TL, BL, TR, BR, TL, TR, BL, BR


[Bus driver objects to goth fiancee's dog lead] --Admiral




[Japanese to launch paper plane from orbit] --Admiral
And they expect it to survive re-entry.  Most excellent! --DR



[Still life, made of food] --Admiral



Contestant for weirdest game of the century: [Cat on a Dolphin]

(Brief explanation:  One button game.  Hold the button to accelerate (with cat attached).  Release the button to release the cat.  Use this to launch the cat out of the water so it can breathe but make sure you catch up to it before it falls)



[Garfield minus Garfield]
So genius they've run out of bandwidth. Is that the Garfield cartoons where they've removed Garfield's "speech", and Jon just looks mad? --CH
That's the ones. Have they been around for a while, then? I hadn't come across them before. - MoonShadow
I think CH is talking about the ones where they've removed Garfield's thought-bubbles, but left him with his sardonic expressions. Those have been around a while, and Alex has several in his screensaver slideshow. But the ones MS linked have removed Garfield altogether, leaving frames which contain only Jon or are completely empty. --Rachael
I was. This is indeed a new step, and I'll look when he's got some more BW... --CH



[Military Review] - 5 years worth of back issues of the journal where the USA military discuss how to fight wars and what went wrong in previous ones (eg the Falklands). --DR


[Robotex] - A company is producing robots scarily like those featured in the film Terminator 3.  All they need now is swarm behaviour or group tactics like the monsters in Jurassic Park. --DR
Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that these are being introduced at the same time as the British army is bringing in their new "Skynet" system? --Tsunami


[How to build your own fusion reactor for under $3000] - billed as the ultimate 'science fair' project for kids.  Make your neighbours glow in the dark.  (They're actually [serious]) --DouglasReay
That's... really, really cool. Why doesn't the Cavendish have one for students? They have the expertise. The radiation is negligible. I'm assuming they haven't falsified their results here. 'Fusion reactor' is a bit misleading - it's a neutron source. It's still probably one of the coolest things an amateur can build in their own garage. It's also slightly worrying that he found his ultrahigh tension supply and his neutron meter on eBay. I mean, who eBays the contents of a nuclear physics lab? --Requiem
I am guessing here, but most likely EX USSR nuclear physicists perhaps... :) --Tsunami
Why misleading? It causes fusion reactions to take place. --Admiral
I guess, but as a piece of equipment it is more a neutron source (produces neutrons at a high rate for the amount of electricity it consumes) than a fusion reactor (moving towards proof-of-concept for a new clean energy source). I know that you will sell more fusion reactors than neutron sources, but one name has connotations they then have to furiously deny all over the rest of the site and the other doesn't. --Requiem



[Pacman as a text adventure]. When mentioned on the ToothyChat, this prompted mention also of [Anti-Pacman].




[Lost in the Static]: a platform/exploration game (perfectly playable), but each screenshot is a field of random static.



[Cambridge congestion survey]



[Cubicle Freakout] Safe for work (Flash required).  Probably mandatory if like me you have the urge to destroy hardware - DDD



[Free Rice]. Pleasingly challenging vocabulary testing game which donates rice to the hungry.
I'm sure I'm missing something. They claim to be paying for the rice via adverts on the page, but I can't see any adverts, and I don't have any ad-blocking apart from popup blocking. --Edwin
I can see understated adverts for iTunes, AmEx?, and Macy's. --CH
I get three ads under the main question box, on all questions except the very first, and they're different on each question. What browser are you using? --Rachael


[Right Brain vs. Left Brain] - Ignoring quite a bit of (sometimes dubious) psychological debate about right/left and female/male brain dominance I'd be interested to see if there is a spread of perception amongst toothywikizens. Maybe people could list which way they see the figure turning at first glance and whether they can make it turn the other way by concentrating.
I see the figure turning clockwise and can't trick my mind into making it turn the other way. --Nat
Me too, although I eventually just about made it go anti-clockwise with the aid of [this]. Based on the way a few friends and I perceived it, I had a suspicion that the left/right-brain correlations are actually reversed, and [Freakonomics] conducted a survey which seems to back this up. --Rachael
I'm just like Rachael: initially it was fixed clockwise, and I could only see it anti-clockwise with the page Rachael linked. --AC
Thanks for the freakonomics article Rachael. The reason I posted was because I suspected that even if the graphic was discriminating between two groups, it was either biased towards clockwise perception or reversed. --Nat

Anti-clockwise first; staring at it I couldn't make it flip, but it does flip when I (say) read the text and see it out of the corner of my eye. Strangely now when I go to the page, it first spins clockwise. Maybe on different days I use different halves of my brain. Maybe they get worn out and have to take a rest. -S.
Clockwise for me, and I couldn't change that without looking at that linked page for ages. --M-A
I wear a digital watch, but her foot goes away from me on the left and towards me on the right.  --SGB
That's what I counted as clockwise. --M-A
Clockwise, and if I didn't have your testimony I'd *swear* it couldn't be seen to be turning anti-clockwise. But when I look at the first of Rachael's links I see *both* the clockwise *and* the anticlockwise figures turning clockwise, and the original one turning anticlockwise, and I cannot make my brain see otherwise or recognise the central image as the same sequence of frames as the other two. *swirlyeyes* Gah! I can make them *all* switch by showing or hiding any one of them! *falls off chair* --Requiem (Edit. With real concentration, tiredness and lack of coffee I can get her to appear to be oscillating rather than rotating.)
Clockwise for me too. Of course, according to the shadow, she's turning anticlockwise. --Admiral
Initially anticlockwise, but with a bit of rapid blinking I can flip which way I see it. --DR



[How US textbooks are written]



Yet another very-simple-but-highly-addictive [puzzle game]. --qqzm
Good core mechanic. About 3 hours of gameplay. --PT
Although I can't manage the last level! Working backwards in my mind, it seems to be impossible... Gah! --CH
It's definitely possible. :) --qqzm


Get [Shaun the Sheep] and friends to become your very own sheepy piano --MJ



[Anime Character Types] from the TV tropes website.  Read the entry for Ninja. --DR


[Tech Shop] - buy a day/month/year pass and have unlimited access to equipment and materials to build your cool inventions. Unfortunately it's in California.


[Flame Warriors] There are a few people I recognise here... :) --Tsunami (including myself :))


[Untied Nations] - one of the best 419 scam emails I have seen in a while. --Admiral


[BBC web page] with pictures of the National Science Museum's storage facilities. Awesome geek stuff here including very early computers, one of the world's first electric cars and lumps of re-enforced concrete... --Tsunami


Hot girls in bikinis and..... [Stormtrouper helmets...] (VERY probaby not safe for work) --Tsunami


[50 craziest celebrity baby names]


[Oh, those wacky Japanese] and their love for game-shows and Tetris. Kinda.



[Oh, those wacky Japanese] and their view of Christianity...




[Top 10 transhumanist technologies]




Use of copy-paste in Disney cartoons (Russian, but the images are interesting in themselves): [1] [2]
Nice.  I'd say that some of the early ones are obviously that way because they really are cell animations - and reusing the same foreground character cells on a new background is just obviously a good idea.  But some of that later stuff where two completely different characters have completely identical poses.. I'd guess that their artists are just very very good at learning the house 'style' and use older material for reference.  Interesting.  --Vitenka
The article claims that it's because creating a sequence requires a key artist's time but adjusting details of an existing animation just needs a tweener. - MoonShadow



[Dilbert] was particularly good 8/7/07.  All you need to know about management consultants.


[Marble adding machine] (text, video. Sound not necessary, but desirable). A wooden 6-bit binary adder using marbles. The rest of the site looks interesting too.


[Animator vs. Animation] This is very cool and meta.
[Animator vs. Animation 2] The sequel, possibly even better. See what happens when the stick figure is The Chosen One!
The first one was incredible! I get a 404 for the second :( --RobHu
Even after we fixed the truncated URL? --Rachael
No, when Alex fixed it it worked for me, and it was great :) --RobHu


[Americans are NOT stupid] ;-) (shame about the spelling)


[New wifi record: 237 miles!] (yes, they managed LOS over 237 miles)


[Many hands make something something] (YouTube? video)


[Prince Pickles] is our image character because he’s very endearing, which is what Japan’s military stands for - Shotaro Yanagi, a Defense Agency official.


[Japanese men in underwear move your cursor around]. Does exactly what it says on the tin ;) (work-safe, needs Flash; linked from the above site rather than directly) - SunKitten


[LOL metal].... instead of LOL cats, LOL heavy metal bands (my favorite is invisible sandwich) --Tsunami


[A trip to the new creationism museum]
Surely this is an embarrasment to the creationists? I for one would be embarrased to have anything to do with that! --Tsunami


[For sale: Another useless cat]


[I want to work for this company ^_^] (and not just because of the cute girl)... A funny video made by the good people at Vimeo, CollegeHumor?, and Busted Tees.


[Very impressive sandcastles]


[Flute Hero] - Because Guitars aren't for everyone.

[Baania Kururin] - Because the world needs more rocket-propelled fox girls.



[US Military designs a "teddy bear" robot to carry wounded soldiers out of combat zones.] "A really important thing when you're dealing with casualties is trying to maintain that human touch." --Admiral


[HOWTO: Converse on ToothyChat]


[Russian CAPTCHA]


[Worst possible time ever to be coming out of a strip club] (pretty SFW, as much as you'd expect the outside of a strip club to be (it's actually much better than you'd expect)). Also, nice bit of city planning going on there (see what is opposite the strip club). Personally, I welcome our new photo taking overlords.


You know the cat macro thing, where cats doing silly things get photos taken of them and equally silly text applied, conforming to a grammar peculiar to that meme? They're (now) called lolcats. [This] is lolcode.
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
DO UNTIL NO WAI
KTHXBYE


[Stamford fairy tale] copy right thingy, as requested.  --Vitenka



[Watching StarWars for the first time] can produce an amusing summary for those who know the film. --MJ


Old but good (for CompScis?), [The story of Mel] and [Real programmers don't use Pascal].


[100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers]. How many did you get?


[AACS v3 DVDs released next week, one slight problem the new keys have already been discovered!] Really I don't know why they bother. Having the new system broken a week before the DVDs are even released has got to tell you you ought to give up --RobHu
Not likely, this is driven by lawyers. I expect that long after the human race has returned to the dust it came from, cease and desist letters will still be flying around (what, you thought lawyers were human?) --Tsunami


[Killer tortoise]


[The latest Japanese thing].  They sound dangerous! --MJ
Latest thing?? I remember seeing an article on these exact things two years ago! --Tsunami


[Cow] (sacred) webcam. With the intent of saving the cow. --Tsunami
Goes to a blank page for me. --Admiral
Shows a webcam of a cow for me --Tsunami


[Saving the internet with hate] - an idea by the guy who wrote the Mongrel web server (popular in Ruby circles) to use hashcash, reputation, and cryptography as a better basis for internet communications (i.e. to replace IRC / IM / etc)


HOWTO create a message for aliens: [Arecibo message] and the [Voyager golden record]


[ARGH my eyes]
I must say, I always had my suspicions about HelloKitty... --MJ


[Cat vs Bear] >^.^<


[Americans and Japanese Read Faces Differently] - proposes an explanation for why they have ^_^ and we have :-)


[Add your Flickr photos to this group and get them exhibited at Tate!] --B (terms and conditions apply)



[Brightly coloured alligators, or lambda calculus?] Link shamelessly stolen from Emperor's LiveJournal. Alex said it should be SOTM'ed.
Cool. Presumably, if you allowed abstract symbols in place between the eggs, you could actually get "useful" functions out of it? --CH
Hmm, no, because they may end up in non-viable locations... --CH
I like it! --B


[Bible Fight!] Ever wanted to see Moses smash up Satan? OK, probably you haven't but if you have such an interest and aren't easily offended you might enjoy this Flash beat-em-up


[Nintendo DS game: Touch young girls to find out if they are a witch]


[Boeing 737] which got a bit lost


http://09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0.com/
Site named after DVD-HD decryption key, apparently.
I wondered about posting this, but I thought MoonShadow would just remove it. --RobHu


[link] for those of you inclined to install linux on dead creatures... --Tsunami


[Model or real?]  It's amazing how toy-like real life looks when taken with a shallow depth of field...
I don't understand. Are they real and supposed to look like models? They look perfectly real to me, and I wouldn't have considered that they might not be if I saw them in isolation without your comment. --Rachael
The depth of field blur is very obviously fake, added after the photo was taken. --Admiral
They're not all great, I admit.  A few of the best are [this one], [this one] and [this one]. --M-A
OK, the cathedral one is quite good. The second one I assumed was a life-size model deer - are you telling me it's a real deer?!
No, it's a life-size model. :) --M-A
Direct links no work! Personally, I find the construction-site ones most effective. --CH
Ah very cool. Apparently the technique used to do this is called [tilt shift]. --RobHu




[Writing By Cool Bits story generator]  -  [this journal has some funny examples ^^]


[Mediaeval Tech Support (youtube)]


[PacMan fic] courtesy of MoonShadow (although posted by RobHu)


RobHu just saw [BlackHoles everywhere]! Also RobHu finds BlackHoles? scary, but that might be because he just woke up from a nightmare.


[Hackety Hack: Making learning programming simple, even for children (or adults ;-))]


[Desktop Tower Defence]. Marvellous Flash game - stop the "creeps" crossing the screen by building a maze of shooty things (apparently á la Warcraft). On Medium or harder, your score is stored and can be put in a group - I've started ToothyWiki. --CH
TowerDefence? is quite a little subgenre of its own.  The best I've found so far is [Master of defence] --Vitenka
I notice the download is a Windows executable. For people as lazy as me, could you enlighten us as to whether it can be made to run on Linux happily? --Admiral
DKDC.  --Vitenka  (There's plenty other flash ones out there though - "Tower defence flash" is the MagicQueryString?)


[Amazingly pretty waterfalls]


[Star trek-style deflector shields]


[Chocolate better than kissing!]


[The truth about Lisp]. REALLY funny if you're a CompSci.
[More truth.] --Requiem
(snigger) --B


[For sale: One useless cat]


[AACS cracked again]. When will they learn? --RobHu
They are learning, every time someone cracks their system, they learn that it is a total waste of bloody time! --Tsunami


[The new Physics]. Hey everyone, everything you were told in physics lessons is wrong. What amazes me most is the way that he manages to spot all the really obvious reasons why what he says is wrong, and say that they mean that he's right after all. --Admiral
That's....quite incredible. Everything seems to start from the way this guy completely failed to understand the concept of "work" when he was in high school. --SF
Nono. He very clearly understands your doubts, and dedicates five or so pages in the first chapter to refuting the idea that the earth does no work holding us here on it. --Admiral
Hmm. You're right, it's the concept of potential energy he never quite managed to grasp, rather than work. (He also needs to be beaten over the head with a biomechanics textbook, but that's another matter). --SF
Any book would do, I think, as long as it is nice and heavy. Come to think of it, a biomechanics textbook sounds just right. --Admiral
I particularly like the line "Not only is there no clear scientific reason to link the Doppler Effect of sound with the Red Shift of light, but it is well known that light is easily red shifted by simply passing it through gases or plastics" --AK
That's really quite funny. Current favourite sentence "Consider something that is absolutely too heavy to move." I feel that this book could be an important teaching aid to an A level physics class - take a chapter each and refute it. Certainly the hardest I ever worked in secondary school was in refuting pseudoscience. --Requiem


[6502 compiler and interpreter in JS]
Sweet --B


[Geometric puzzles] - build shapes to match the three elevations, using the number of bricks stated. Note - gravity doesn't apply, but you'll often have to temporarily add a brick to get a face you can build off.
They are disappointingly easy, despite the claim otherwise at the top of the page. And number 8 can be done with far fewer blocks than they seem to think. Numbers 1 and 9 are probably the hardest. --Admiral


[Guardian Unlimited: Men don't kill women, manga does]


[Programmers challenge at GDC 07]




BruceSchneier announces [second movie plot threat contest]



[Rights for robots!] (but note the date... :)


[Tiny Houses] --M-A



[C Puzzles]
Some of those are quite silly. Number 2 would have been more interesting if gur flagnk uvtuyvtugvat qvqa'g tvir vg njnl. --Rachael
Just looks like a big catalogue of beginner's mistakes, TBH. --MoonShadow



[Playstation 3 now responsible for 72% of folding@home calculations] - interestingly 1 TFLOP means 1050 'Windows CPUs', 41 Playstation 3s, 40 Mac OS X/Intel? (which must mean the new Core 2 Duos), or 17 "GPUs" (which I think means a particular model of one of the new fangled graphics cards) --RobHu


[Ricky Gervais explains Genesis]


[On One Map] - A rather nice Google maps mashup that lets you see what places are available for renting and buying. Also has filters and RSS feeds. Rather handy IMO. --RobHu


[Only with Wiki] would you get fantasy and mythical cuisine recipes.  Anyone know any new ones to add? --MJ


[Thankyou for flying Hello Kitty]


[Five Geek Social Fallacies]
Uh oh. I recognise GSF2 and 3 in myself :S --RobHu


[Monolith - muddying the waters of the digital copyright debate]


[What's really on the opposite side of the world from what]. Interesting interactive map. Could you tell me precisely what countries are on the opposite side of the world from New Zealand? You can now.
Very roughly speaking, it appears Cambridge is on the other side of the world from the international date line SW of NZ. Which, I suppose, is kind of the same thing as saying "Cambridge is roughly on the Greenwich meridian". I feel all silly now.
Well, you've got a latitude as well.  --Vitenka (who ver very nearly called it a 'depth')


[Finnish MP seeks Klingon vote]. It was inevitable really. Heghlu'meH QaQ? jajvam. tlhIngan maH! --RobHu
Rob, you hardly needed an exclamation mark after your summary (Hab SoSlI?' Quch). There's no way to say the worst insult in the Klingon language in a calm manner. --Admiral


[Don't like ID cards? Hand over your passport] --RobHu


[Aliens shun GM crops.] Says it all really. --Admiral


[Faith brokers]. Sinners, this is the site for you! --Tsunami


[TED Talks] - Categories: TimeSink, WorkSafe?, TechnicalMatters?.  Short talks on ideas.  Includes talks by Martin Rees (Master of Trinity), Ray Kurzweil, Al Gore, Negroponte, Richard Dawkins, Jimmy Wales, Burt Rutan and many others. --DouglasReay


[How not to run a good PR campaign for your university atheism society] (nsfw?)
It got them on international media.  I'd say that as a PR stunt it more than did its duty.  Also it was in direct response to a preacher giving the opposite offer.  --Vitenka (Plus, it's hilarious, whilst also making a good point.)
Indeed. Let's face it, if you truly believe that "pornography was less harmful than holy scriptures", and have a great American love of free speech then logically this would seem a great idea. Just set yourself up doing something legal, and wait for the foaming-mouthed people to turn up and embarrass themselves. And they will. (I can say this, as a Christian. There's an awful lot of Christian nuts who don't get it out there.) --Admiral


[Things to say when you're losing a technical argument] :-D


[The happiest monster] (possibly slightly disturbing)


[Russian Pigs... IN SPACE!]


[CiSRA puzzle competition]. Puzzles (some by David Morgan-Mar of WebComics/IrregularWebcomic) with prizes for Australian students, but open to teams of 4 from anywhere. ChrisHowlett HasNoTime? but is interested anyway (and is working on puzzle C.1).
Hmm. I looked at the four puzzles and thought "wow, how cool!" Then I looked through the worked example and was disappointed. I didn't recognise a single one of the songs (maybe I'm just uncultured?) and I thought several of the subsequent steps of reasoning felt very arbitrary. So I'm less keen to work on the actual puzzles now, in case they're similar. --Rachael


[The real reason building software is not like building bridges]


["When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, multiple computer systems crashed on the planes. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline."] OMG! Guess what [language they used] !
And then of course there's [Windows for Warships]. --Admiral


[Euphoria physics engine]


[Translation from PR speak to English of the recent letter by Macrovision to Steve Jobs]


[YouKnowYoureInaBigCompanyWhen]. RobHu recognises "Whenever you have a spark of inspiration, your first thought is Is this idea really worth fighting for?"


[The amazing capabilities of Vista voice recognition] --Admiral
(PeterTaylor) That brings back memories of trying to dictate LaTeX? to IBM's ViaVoice?. Mind you, dictating LaTeX? to my mother wasn't much better.


[Spanking the cat 2]


[The Algorithm March] Tags: Japanese, Geeky, MindWorm?, Weird, WorkSafe?.  --DouglasReay
That was awesome --RobHu


[Warning! Self referential sign]


[Indexed], a webcomic done in graphs --RobHu


[Scribbled-on-the-back-of-a-napkin] look and feel, for prototyping GUIs while reducing the risk that management will think you're almost done just because they can see the UI. --M-A
Love it! - SunKitten


[How to be a cult leader], absolutely hilarious --RobHu


[Batteries, rechargable from a USB slot]. Via M-A and ToothyChat.


Hello Kitty bondage hotel [suite]... (no real need for any explanations I think...) --Tsunami
Actually, the remainder if the entries on this site are some of the most terrifying things I have ever encountered on teh interwebs! --Tsunami


[If real life reflected anime]


For those who would rather enter a still-running functional programming contest than work on ICFP's 2006 contest, the International LISP Conference has announced its 2007 programming contest. FWIW, the conference will be hosted in Cambridge (at ClareCollege). http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2007/~111b2bf3ba2a2d2cbcc9f3b4~/contest


ArsTechnica? have [an amusing piece] on the recent attempt by Penguin of [creating a Novel collaboratively using a Wiki] (at the amusingly named - amillionpenguins.com) --RobHu


[The results] of an attempt to move a webcomic from one content management system to another. --Admiral


[The Chronicles Of George] - tickets raised by a clueless helpdesk engineer, accompanied by sarcastic captions from his annoyed co-worker.
Not work-safe. Unless you can have hysterics silently. --CH
Yes, this is one of the funniest things on the internet --RobHu
I disagree. It's just a load of misspellings and bad English. --Admiral
There's plenty of technical incompetence as well as just terrible grammar (and note that George is a native English speaker). But for me the humour comes from the other guy's comments and captions; it would be lost if there were only George's contributions. --Rachael


What with all the recent talk of DRM, it's illuminating to see this [screen shot of the inside of the Vista kernel].


[Graffiti the Blue Rigi for £5 a sqaure]


[All we wanna do is eat your brains]. The video sucks but the song is funny. --RobHu
The song is indeed not a bad one, by JonathanCoulton? as mentioned on AlexChurchill/AMV. I prefer his songs "MandelbrotSet" and "CodeMonkey?", but quite a number of them are good. SeeAlso [his other songs]. --AC


[Bastard Tetris / Bastet] an implementation of tetris where an algorithm gives the tetromino you least need --RobHu


[Windows error message]
I get a message saying '4-chan leech'. You might want to link to the page or something, rather than directly linking the image? - SunKitten
The entire thing is an error message "Microso... [Ah heck, mirrored.]  --Vitenka
Ah, I got a direct link to the image but it seems they check referrer now. Thanks for the mirror Vitenka --RobHu


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