I recently used a restroom that had a stall that made you feel like you were hunkered down in a bomb shelter. Why? There were eight rolls of toilet paper. Now, I’ve seen plenty of bathrooms that have 2 rolls, which makes perfect sense. The janitorial staff can replace one if it’s empty when they […]

I’ve been listening to books on CD on my commute and I recently listened to a book called Improve Your Memory by Gary Small. I wasn’t all that impressed by the book, especially since I had to search the web to find the title and author. You’d think after having just read a book on […]

I have a list of ideas that I’d like to implement (I use MediaWiki, the same software that runs wikipedia.org, to manage all of my lists and things I want to remember. It’s turned out quite nicely). But back to my original point. On the list of things to implement, I had the idea to […]

Here’s a collection of seamless pictures that are pretty slick. It takes a few seconds to pick up on the subtleties. They remind me of M.C. Escher’s work.

I’ve been an Opera fan for several years now, but I haven’t used Opera 8.x in the past year because it didn’t support several essential features in Gmail (like auto-completing e-mail addresses). As a result, I’ve used Firefox exclusively. The last few releases of Firefox have seemed to make it more sluggish and there has […]

deathforecast.com said I’m expected to live until 77. Drat. I was hoping for at least 80.

This is very entertaining, especially the video where people walk by and wonder how in the heck someone managed to get their head stuck in the wall. (via William Bragg)

Related to the opt out for life post, Rob Cockerham’s experiment will make you want to buy a crosscutting shredder on the way back from mailing your opt out request. He calls the experiment the Torn up Credit Card Application. It’s a pretty good name seeing as he tears up one of the credit card […]

I’ve been trying to post every morning (on weekdays) to get back into a steady rhythm of blogging, but this morning I was involved with another, far more important, activity. My wife gave birth to our second child (a boy). This photo does a far better job of describing him than anything I could write. […]

A mere month after I move out of Utah, a blogging conference is held within walking distance of where I used to live. Coincidence, or conspiracy? It sounds like they had great participation (over 150 people attended) assisted by the free food and t-shirts I’m sure. Of course people have blogged about the event including […]

My United States geography skills could use some work according to this fun little place the state site. You just drag states into place and it tells you how far off you are. My average error was 87 miles. William’s was only 26 miles. (via William Bragg)

A while ago I toyed with the idea of sending out notifications of new blog entries and eventually began doing it. However, I have found that they have had an unanticipated impact on my daily blogging, apart from my original concern that people wouldn’t want to unsubscribe. I resolved that by switching to WordPress and […]

A for-profit builder built a home for $200,000 that uses zero energy. That’s some sweet energy saving action. I thought those types of homes would have cost several times that amount and while this one is 1650 sq feet, that’s still a good deal. The house actually needs to borrow some energy from the power […]

I have it on good authority that the site optoutprescreen.com is a legitimate and fairly successful way to opt out of all sorts of junk mail. First, the site is mentioned on the FTC’s site as a way to reduce the amount of unsolicited credit and insurance offers. Second, Ed Foster researched the site and […]

There was a braingle brain teaser based on the claim that hot water freezes faster than cold water, known as the Mpemba effect, but I found out that there’s quite a bit of controversy on the veracity of the claim. There was also quite a bit of discussion on the braingle web site itself. The […]

You’ve probably seen the classic marketing pictures used in so many advertisements nowadays. I never thought much about their overuse, but forty media provides a humorous commentary on 10 oft-used photos in marketing.

I received this in a humor newsletter. I’ve seen several variations but I have yet to understand how this works mathematically. Does anyone know? It’s probably best to try it before you read too much further (in case someone is able to explain it) because like magic tricks, they’re usually not nearly as impressive after […]

In my Statistics class we discussed the problem below and my knee jerk reaction was you have a 50/50 chance of winning whether you switch or stay. What do you think? Suppose you’re on a game show and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. […]

When I was a wee lad I loved listening to a song about a little tug boat named Little Toot on the record player. So great was my vigor and enjoyment of this song that I would often dance about, emphasizing the toots in the song with a vigorous leap of joy. My family was […]