Category: Oddities

Big Dead Place is a site with stories about working in Antarctica:

Many of the early explorers who came to Antarctica were underfunded buffoons who did not first consult Appropriations Subcommittees before facing the unique and exciting challenges that Antarctica offered for the future. As a result, they lacked innovative leadership, and died miserably of starvation while freezing to death.

…

In fact, the main purpose of the United States Antarctic Program, as stated by an external panel report published by NSF, is to establish a physical and political presence. This presence is kind of like hopping out of the car to stand in a parking space so no one nabs it while your friend drives around the block. (Our friend in this metaphor would be the as-of-yet nonexistent technology to cost-effectively extract minerals or hydrocarbons from Antarctica.)

Bad Fellowship Of The Ring Captions (via Caveat Lector) demonstrate that shoddy bootlegs are good for a laugh.

Female or She-male? (found via jwz) has been parodied (?) by a far more web-geeky test, spot the giference, which asks are these kitten (photo)s gifs or jpgs? (found via centricle).

New Scientist describes research providing insight into how people become good at memorization:

The team at University College London found that the master memorisers have neither higher IQs nor special brain structures to explain their talent. Instead, when debriefed after the memory tests, many admitted they always use an ancient Greek mnemonic technique known as “method of loci”.

From Mike Swain‘s Tech News.