Archive for Taz
View Your Website as a Graph
View your website as a graph, using a special Java applet created by Fernando Luis Lara. The graph morphs in real-time as the applet parses your website. The source code is available.
At left is a graph of Net-Warriors.com. The dots are identified by color:
Blue - links
Red - tables
Green - div tag
Violet - images
Yellow - forms
Orange - line breaks and block quotes
Black - HTML tag
Gray - all other tags
143 Simpsons Mistakes
To be filed under the category “Too much time on their hands,” MovieMistakes.com has compiled a visual list of 143 Simpsons mistakes.
One such mistake appears in the opening credits of every Simpsons TV episode. As shown in this photo, when Maggie goes through the supermarket checkout, Marge’s shopping cart is gray and has a red handle. But in the next shot when Maggie pops out of the shopping bag, the cart and handle are turquoise. This is known as a continuity error, and a quick perusal of any entry on Internet Movie Database will show that every movie and TV show has dozens of similar errors.
So which is the best (worst) movie mistakes? The site asks its viewers to vote, and the winner is Star Wars: When the stormtroopers break into the control room, the trooper on the right of the screen hits his head on the door frame. To cover this mistake, LucasFilm added a corresponding “thump” sound on the DVD release. As Homer Simpson would say, “D’oh!”
Giant "Telescope" Links New York to London
After more than a century, the vision of Victorian engineer Alexander Stanhope St. George has finally been realized. Massive dirt-covered drill bits emerged from the ground–one by the Thames River near the Tower Bridge in London, and the other on Fulton Ferry Landing by the Brooklyn Bridge in New York–thus completing St. George’s transatlantic tunnel. Workers removed the drills and fitted both tunnel ends with identical Telectroscopes, allowing Londoners and New Yorkers separated by 3500 miles to view each other in real-time.
The Telectroscope is device that’s 37 feet long by 11 feet high and allows people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. Think 19th-century Webcam or Victorian-age video phone.
In reality, the trans-Atlantic tunnel is a trans-Atlantic broadband network rounded off on each end with HD cameras. The Telectroscope itself was a fanciful idea that, according to St. George, resulted from a typo by a 19th-century reporter who misspelled Electroscope, a device used to measure electrostatic charges. “The journalist also misunderstood what it was about and wrote in the article that it was a device for the suppression of absence,” St. George said. “The accidental hope captured their imagination, and lots of people at the end of the 19th century thought it was a great idea.”
Tulip Farms Bloom in Color
From the air, tulip farms look like a giant kaleidoscope. Brilliant stripes of red, yellow, purple, pink, orange and green make up a glorious technicolor patchwork.
The Netherlands devotes more than 25,000 acres to tulips and produces more than three billion tulip flowers each year. Farmers plant the bulbs in late October and harvest them in May, selling the the cut flowers to florists and supermarkets. Two-thirds of the vibrant blooms are exported, mostly to the U.S. and Germany.
This photo shows an extraordinary 60 million tulips coming into flower. When the flowers and color are gone, the land is cultivated for vegetables.
Living with Volcanoes
National Geographic features life in Indonesia in the shadow of smoldering Mount Merapi. Columns of noxious gas and jittery seismographs signal an imminent explosion. The government has ordered a full-scale evacuation, but many residents have refused to leave.
Merapi, whose name means “fire mountain,” is a natural-born killer. Rising almost 10,000 feet, it ranks among the world’s most active and dangerous volcanoes. An eruption in 1930 killed more than 1,300 people. The surrounding area is frequently affected by lava flows, rockfalls, and toxic gases.
Nowhere else do so many live so close to so many active volcanoes—129 by one count. On Java alone, 120 million people live in the shadow of more than 30 active volcanoes.
Ansel Adams Photographs
Ansel Adams (1902–84) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West. In 1941, the National Park Service commissioned Adams to create a photo mural for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. The theme was “nature as exemplified and protected in the U.S. National Parks.” World War II halted the project, and it was never resumed.
The National Archives still retains 226 photographs taken for this project, most of them signed and captioned by Adams. They were taken at many national parks parks including Glacier, Grand Canyon, Kings Canyon, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone and Yosemite.
Amazing Real-Life MacGyver Moments
MacGyver is a television series that ran from 1985-92 and featured the laid-back, extremely resourceful secret agent MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson. MacGyver favored brain over brawn in order to solve desperate problems using common items, along with duct tape and his Swiss Army knife. MacGyver’s ability to improvise complex solutions in life-or-death situations in mere minutes was a major attraction of the show.
Check out a list of problems solved by MacGyver
If MacGyver were real, the world would be a much safer place, and not just for people with mullets. Even though MacGyver is a fictional character, Cracked.com details five amazing real-life MacGyver moments. For example, in World War II, British spies copied top-secret maps of enemy troop movements using lemon Jello.
Volcano Thunderstorm
“Few sights in nature can compare to the sheer magnificence of a volcano erupting in full flow. But while scenes of molten lava are relatively commonplace, this otherworldly picture of Chaiten Volcano in southern Chile shows a truly spectacular, and devastating, volcanic phenomenon.
“As clouds of toxic ash and dust tower into the sky, they ionize the air, generating an explosive electrical storm. Colossal forks of lightning spark around the noxious plume as it spews from the volcano’s crater, creating an image of raw, terrifying energy - as if the air itself were ablaze.”
The 3,300-foot Chaiten Volcano, 800 miles south of the Chilean capital Santiago, is erupting for the first time in thousands of years.
Beautiful Islands
National Geographic has assembled a collection of gorgeous photographs of small islands. The photo at left shows a dramatic collar of coral reefs ringing Mondriki Island (in the foreground) and Monu Island (background), two of Melanesia’s Fiji Islands. The Fiji Islands are made up of 333 islands in the South Pacific, known for their sparkling beaches, coral gardens, and lush rain forests.
All U.S. Streets
At left is an image of 26 million individual road segments in the United States. No other features (such as boundaries or mountains) are included, however you can plainly see the mountains and sparsely populated areas from the lack of streets. The data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau and is mapped by computers using data visualization techniques.
