[source]

[magnets]

This is the floor plan. It's a 3 bedroom, but in order to get from the entrance to the living room, you have to walk through the master bedroom and the other two bedrooms. This strangely linear place would be the perfect place to buy if you wanted to open up a dungeon and put the end boss where the office is.



[Via this article via Andrew on GR]

So there's this equation out there called Drake's equation. You use it to figure out how many planets out there could potentially have intelligent life. Start with how many stars are out there, eliminate those that don't have planets, eliminate those that don't have planets at the right distance, eliminate those without an atmosphere, so on and so on. It works out to be an infinitesimally small amount.

This American Life listeners have heard about this guy who applied the same principles to figure out his own odds of getting married. He started with how many people lived in his area, cut that number in half since we was only interested in men, found out what percentage of women were in the age range he desired, and then continued further narrowing down the options until he calculated his odds of finding marriage to be 1 in 285,000. That's .00035% if I moved my decimals correctly.

If you want to read more, Digg has the link to the article. Smarmy commenters suggest that the reason the guy's odds are so bad is because he is the type of guy that you would calculate them but I guess since publishing his findings he's gotten marriage proposals from across the globe.

[Heart photo credit: Ashley Dinges]

And finally, as shared by Becky on Google Reader, we have a study by some scientists who looked to track how quickly spoons disappeared from their office. There's more info over at Discover Magazine, but basically they secretly marked a population of spoons and set them off into the wild. In five months, 80% of the spoons were gone. They even tracked which rooms lost spoons the fastest. Check out the link for the full report.

From this Joystiq post:

Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril, the new NES platformer (!) by Sivak Games, was officially released on an honest-to-goodness NES cartridge yesterday. The game, inspired by super-hard games like I Wanna Be the Guy, contains over 550 rooms and 8 bosses, and comes on a translucent green cartridge that is designed to work in any region's NES.

At least that's how the weird comma placement in this headline makes it sound.


[original article] [source]

If you're like me, you haven't caught an episode of the Daily Show in a year or two, but luckily the internet keeps me posted if anything funny happens. Jon Stewart points out how blogs and stuff like us use over-the-top language to exaggerate things. I promise it's way more entertaining than that sounds. And let's tag this NSFW shall we?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Blogs Must Be Crazy
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

[source]

Not sure why. This was on MAKE where they had a post called "Flying Panty Ornithopter" about a real life event coming up where people are going to fly stuff like this.

As posted over on RPS, Ubisoft is adding some ridiculous new Digital Rights Management to their games. While these days companies have done some stupid things to trying and stop pirating, this one takes the cake.

The game requires a constant connection to the internet. So that means if, while you are playing in single player mode, your internet connection drops for any reason, the game instantly boots you out to a menu and discards all progress that you've made up to that point. Similarly, if the Ubisoft servers have any issues, it also instantly boots you to the menu screen.

As the people over at RPS comment, "It’s like someone taking away your food mid-meal because your napkin’s fallen on the floor"

In order to draw attention to the sheer amount of public information please put online, someone came up with Please Rob Me. It mines twitter for public twitter status messages that a robber could use to figure out when you're away from home (sortable by city!)



Edit: I gave it a try and with what people post on Facebook combined, I was able to find one guy's name, address, and phone number. He graduated from Michigan in 2008, went to Washtenaw Community College and graduated from Saline High School. He loves laser tag and podcasting his live Dungeons and Dragons game.

[source]

For the past few days, I've been letting Picasa (free from Google) go through my photos and do face detection on my hundreds of gigs of photos. So I told it "Hey Picasa, this is Ciara," gave it some examples, and let it go.



As it went through sorting her and other friends into categories, it found this photo and was like "here's Ciara"


But it wasn't referring to Chris. It had found her in the photo on the bookshelf and was like "here she is"



Amazing. I'm excited for it to complete scanning because I hope that it will find some friend like "oh here they are in a background of a photo 6 years ago before you knew them"

[more]

I think my favorite misspelling is when people misspell "Satan" as "Satin" because it turns Satan into a soft, flowing fabric with just one letter.

EXAMPLE 1 (source):

“Ouija boards are evil and a powerful tool that Satin uses to put people in bondage once they become involved with it.”

EXAMPLE 2 with bonus adorbz (source):

Either that or this is a great costume and this is two five year olds: one on the other's shoulders. Here, I queued it up for you to save you time:


[via buzzfeed]

Sure, this would be decently easy to fake, but I choose to believe that it is true

This is great.

Believe it or not, there is a certain subset of the internet-using population that uses google for everything. Rather than typing www.pepsi.com, they go to google and type www.pepsi.com into the search bar and then click on the first link that pops up (which 98% of the time is what they're looking for).

So here's what happened. As Eston just linked on his Twitter acct, ReadWriteWeb just put up an article that includes the words "facebook" and "login" in the title. So when these people search for "facebook login" on google, they go straight to this article and think that this article is facebook and that some sort of horrible redesign has happened and facebook has hidden the log in section, preventing them access to farmville. Some example comments are below. RWW even had to post a disclaimer just to help people out.



This is how people get taken by phishing scams. If you need information about phishing scams to make sure you don't get taken, please send me $2000 and then I will transfer the money from my Nigerian Bank account. Just email me your credit union login and we'll launder the money through your mother's account (what was her maiden name again?).

Oh, yeah, here's the original article with all the comments.

edit: it would seem they may have been using Bing, not Google.

[source]

I have quite the queue of books lined up to read and I'm starting to make my way through them. Today I just started The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, a book written in 1895 that fits into Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The introduction to the Dover edition of the book certainly does the man no favors:

"Today, almost all of Chambers's work is forgotten. It is doubtful if his novels are even read for period nostalgia. Indeed, their fate has taken a paradoxical turn. They were once so common and in so little demand that used-book stores discarded the or consigned them to the ten-cent bin"

Tell me more, O kind-hearted introduction!

"This rejection of Chambers is as it should be"

.[Yes, the point of the introduction is to say that The King in Yellow is the one thing that lasted among all "six or seven million words he wrote", but still. Give the guy some credit: this is the introduction. Save your maligning for the epilogue.]

[Also, Arkham Horror fans, I'll let you know if reading this book makes me lose 1 sanity and gain 4 clue tokens]

Yes, this is from a real movie. We fast forwarded through it to all the entertaining parts.


See also: Infographic that puts the shark's speed at 706 KPH