Monday, July 18, 2005

Google maps nuclear explosions

HYDESim: High-Yield Detonation Effects Simulator is an application that uses the Google mapping API to calculate the places that would get destroyed by nuclear explosions in various American cities.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Why are flies so hard to swat?

Flight of the Fly from livescience.com gives a short explanation, including this video.

Gwyneth Card of the California Institute of Technology presents the results of her experiments at at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Main Meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

Answer: flies jump; they don't fly.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Simply Audiobooks - the NetFlix of Audio books

Simply Audiobooks - North America's Audio Book Rental Company

$19.95/mo and you can rent as many audio books as you like. The service works just like Netflix: return in a prepaid envelope and get the next one in a few days.

Cool watches

What? Your Watch Only Tells Time? - New York Times

suggests Watchreport.com as a place to get info about very cool new watches.

Two reliable online watch sellers in Japan are: Kseiya.zoovy.com and Higuchi-inc.com.

MS Word tip of the day (sorting paragraphs)

WSJ.com - Mossberg's Mailbox has a great tip I'll have to remember.

Let's say you've got a bunch of entries for a bibliography or another list that you want sorted. For example, maybe it's list of people you're tracking for a party invitation or mail merge.

Just enter all your information in separate paragraphs like you do normally. Then select Table / Sort and Word will sort it by paragraph. Easy!

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Car seats are no better than seat belts

From a brand new paper by the author of Freakonomics:

"Using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) on all fatal
crashes in the United States from 1975-2003, I find that child safety seats, in actual
practice, are no better than seat belts at reducing fatalities among children aged 2-6."