Articles

Pass It On

February 10, 2011 –

Remember the telephone game from grade school? The one where a phrase like “Billy plays a brown tuba” would whisper through a dozen kids and end up “Eat ten trays of ground loofah?” Back then, it was just plain fun.

To Delete, Or Not To Delete

February 8, 2011 –

What happens when someone suspects a Wikipedia entry of not having the right stuff? There’s a process for that:

Like a garden, an online encyclopedia needs constant weeding.

Snow, In Celtics

February 4, 2011 –

Blizzards keep socking New England, and now, you can put a Celtic spin on this season’s epic snowfall with the Boston Globe’s total-tracking Shaq-o-meter.

Where The Streets Have Your Name

February 2, 2011 –

Thirteen months ago, as the story goes, I went mappy. Quoth myself:

Be Right Back

January 26, 2011 –

Sooner or later, we all die of something, as National Geographic illustrates in their classic Ways To Go chart:

Them’s the overall statistics… however, I checked with Vegas, and if Yours Truly takes a dirt nap in the next coupla days, 4:1 odds it’s because of the flu.

Trash Tracked

January 20, 2011 –

Garbage has legs, and in Migration Of Receipts, designer Cameron Zotter maps the travels of 150 discarded sales slips found during a 48-hour canvas of downtown Baltimore. He also gives us some trash-tossing insight:

Astro-Logical

January 19, 2011 –

On Ophiuchus and the rest of the recent new Zodiac kerfuffle, I must call Bullshittarius: the astrological sign of the Red Herring. Why? Because David McCandless and friends have analyzed the text of 22,000 online horoscopes and found that they’re different permutations of the same few words, more or less.

A Matter Of Seconds

January 14, 2011 –

The fresh crop of redshirts? Damn it Jim, they’re too young to remember. But once upon a time, decades ago, Hollywood produced a particularly awful movie – and then walloped us with a don’t-miss follow-up installment that was truly worth watching.