All Too Flat is hosting a unique search service called Google Mirror. Everything on the page is reversed, including the results page, if you get any. You have to type in your search result backwards too. You have to try it see how trippy it is to use a web page backwards. After a while, you’ll start to be able to read it just fine. Or not.

Serious Lego is dedicated to inventions using the “Lego Mindstorms” robot-building kits. This person, JP Brown has built the most incredible creatures using just Legos and the Mindstorms kits. One of the more impressive ones is the CubeSolver, which uses a WebCam and custom color-recognition software written in C++ and VB5 that solves a standard 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube by itself!

There are a lot of other models on this site, including K9, a dog that plays fetch, HanoiSolver, a robot that solves the... [More]

Serious LegoAndrew Lipson has a site of Lego sculptures, of which some are Mathematical Lego (TM) Sculptures. It’s pretty stunning what people do with Legos out there, and there are a lot of fan sites. Henry Lim’s Lego Sculptures has a Stegosaurus that stands about 5 feet high. Another guy, Eric Harshbarger, built a desk out of legos. A lot of these guys use the tools and community found at LDraw, where you can find CAD-like tools for designing LEGO structure without the bricks.

Received through email.

A friend told me the following story about a former Enron accountant who gave up his CPA position to become a farmer. The first thing he decided to do was to buy a mule.

He dickers with a local farmer at the general store, and they agree that the local will sell the accountant a mule for $100. The Enron accountant gives the man $100 cash, and the man agrees to deliver the mule the next day.

Next morning, the man shows up at the Enron accountant’s place without the... [More]

They Might Be Giants has a web site promoting their new album, No!, The First Album for the Whole Family. It has 30 seconds of each track on the album, 4 of which are accompanied by very cute little joyful games to play along with the music. The robot one is my favorite. Pass the mouse over the little ones and they wave their flags; click on them and they take off and land with parachutes. Click on the big robot to make him do stuff; his armpits shoot off fireworks. The No! one is pretty good... [More]

Here’s a humorous Flash film by Bruno Bozzetto in english and italian showing the pitfalls of driving by the rules. It’s called Yes & No, a dyseducational road movie. It shows several common driving situations with an aggressive solution (Yes) and a defensive solution (No!). It ends with the epithet: “Tell me how you drive and I’ll tell you what kind of idiot you are”.

I got this in email the other day. It seems like a good one that’s been around for a while, but the names are pretty interchangeable (depending on your affiliation, of course). I was too lazy to choose more neutral names, though; with this group, there’s no way to twist it my liking.

Given that Al Gore has no job, he decided to take a sightseeing vacation to Europe.

While visiting England, he is invited to tea with the Queen. He asks her what her leadership philosophy is. She says that it... [More]

The Onion has the latest from venerable columnist Jim Anchower: a rant about movies called What the Hell is Wrong with Movies These Days?. His review of Star Wars is particularly scathing and hilarious:

“I saw the new Star Wars movie, and even that blew. I mean, yeah, there were some great space scenes, and you get to watch Yoda fight with a light saber, but as soon as the weed wore off, the whole thing just dragged. The love story was totally sappy, and there were all these long, boring scenes... [More]”

SatireWire just published Arabs Slyly Building Wall Around Israel in response to a Yahoo News article Israel Begins Work on West Bank Fence. Yahoo claims the Israeli efforts are “aimed at protecting Israelis from Palestinian suicide bombers”, but SatireWire claims that they are “unwittingly footing the bill to construct the first stage of an 800-mile-long wall meant to seal off the entire state of Israel from everyone else.”

Go read the SatireWire article for the full story.

Worth 1000, a website that holds Photoshop contests, has a good one called Best Friends. It’s a contest to come up with the best picture showing Arafat and Sharon as “best friends”.

The White House has issued a new set of 6 posters created to help Americans through this trying time.

“Attention American Citizens! You stand hereby directed to prove your patriotism by printing out hundreds of the wartime morale posters below, and distributing them widely throughout your community!”

Anyone not joining in will be determined to be an “Arabiac”, as described in John Ashscroft’s latest press release, Attorney general ashcroft announces new hospitality measures for arabiac immigrants... [More]

Motion Playground has a Ski Stunt Simulator on their Games page. There’s a Java version that you can play online, trying out the ‘kicker jump’, ‘the wall’, ‘crash and burn’, ‘practice’. ‘Practice’ is good for just trying flips:

front flip

lean back and down, then move forward quickly; the mouse should make a horizontal line to the right, then back to center

back flip

lean forward and down and then move back and up quickly; the mouse should make a counter-clockwise C-shape

Those are my... [More]

Someone put a lot of time and effort into creating this map of Springfield (from the Simpsons). It took me a while, but I finally found Moe’s and the Kwik-E-Mart.

The original was found at CrapHound.

The caption is a bit small, but it reads:

<q>Thomas Martello, 6, whose dad died at the World Trade Center, manages a smile as President Bush takes yet another crack at spelling his own name correctly.</q>

Do you miss Myst? Try out this groovy game Kharon4a with a DNA theme, available in English and Norwegian. It’s got a cool soundtrack.

If you’ve ever watched Conan O’Brien, then perhaps you’ve seen Triumph, a hand puppet of a cigar-smoking dog. He’s often hilarious, but I’ve never seen him better than in Triumph at Star Wars (available from ShizNitt). It’s a ten-minute WMV (Windows Media Player movie) file and shows him interviewing, insulting and sadly mocking the “nerds and geeks” that come out to stand in line for Star Wars movies.

If the link above doesn’t work, then try to download from a local copy I made here [Triumph... [More]

I received this through email and thought it was a nice demonstration of the Powers of 10. If you’ve been to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, this will be familiar to you, but it doesn’t go quite as far as that one does. This Java applet lets you navigate from 1023, “10 million light years from the Milky Way Galaxy” to 10-15, “face to face with a proton”. Be patient, sometimes it takes a few seconds to load the next frame once you click an arrow.

USA Patriot Registration on the White House lets you sign up for Ashcroft’s new program. Register now to make sure you’re in the clear.

You probably know one, a pen-spinner. One of those tricks that looks so easy, so cool, so non-chalant. The kind of trick that makes you throw your pen across the room when you try it, so you have to skulk, hunched over and mortified, to pick it back up.

Pentix to the rescue.

This site has detailed, illustrated instructions for the most popular pen-spinning tricks, (like the Normal), usually accompanied by a movie of the technique.

U.S. Treasury predicts September 11!

Take a $20 Bill and fold it 3 times to get hidden warnings from the U.S. government! They knew about it all along!

In an announcement that has simultaneously stunned the auto world and silenced vocal critics, Porsche AG issued a recall yesterday on all 911 models. The recall covers all model years from the 1982 Coupe and Targa to the present day Coupe, Targa, Cabriolet, Carrera, and GT2.

Citing numerous incidents of vigilantism that ended up destroying several vehicles in the New York City area and endangering consumer’s lives, Porsche has determined that the model name’s stigma now “…constitutes a real... [More]”

Cassandra Claire has written the definitive, behind-the-scenes diaries kept by the stars of the the Fellowship of the Ring (Lord of the Rings). The diaries are scattered throughout her(?) online journal, but have been gathered together very nicely here* and, if that site’s not working, here. As both pages mention, the diaries are the most fun when read in order. The diaries are rife with homoerotic humor, but it’s mostly pretty funny. My favorites are Ringwraith #5 and Legolas (still the... [More]

Kodak is hosting a feature called On the Road: American Mile Markers. Matt Frondorf drove across the country from New York City to San Fransisco, taking a picture every mile out the passenger side window of his car. The camera was hooked to the odometer and fired every mile, but every 36 miles, he’d have to change the film he didn’t pull over or stop.

“I would count the miles,“ he says. “As soon as the thirty-sixth came, I would change rolls, put the exposed roll in a canister, enter its number... [More]”

SatireWire published Closed Disinformation Agency Can’t Convince Staff It’s Closed, which does Joseph Heller proud with Rumsfeld playing the role of Major Major and a subordinate filling in for Milo.

““We got ya, sir, we’re ‘closed’,” said a winking Major Chad Brumley when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld found him at his desk again today. “There is no one here spreading misinformation now, and certainly there won’t be anyone here spreading misinformation daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sir.””

Which side of the road do they drive on? explains exactly that. It covers, in fascinating detail, which countries of the world drive on which side of the road. The map to the left is from the site and shows right-driving countries in yellow and left-driving countries in red. Don’t be fooled by the appearance of surface area, though:

“Having often encountered the implicit assumption that everyone but England and some of her colonies drive on the right side of the road, I compiled … a quick... [More]”

This is an actual letter sent to a Bank in the US. The Bank thought it
amusing enough to publish in the New York times.

Dear Sir,

I am writing to thank you for bouncing the cheque with which I endeavored
to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations some three nanoseconds
must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque, and the arrival in
my account of the funds needed to honor it. I refer, of course, to the
automatic monthly deposit of my entire salary, an arrangement which, I
admit,... [More]

…as our menu has changed. Try this phone number:

510-809-4466

for a fun look at Enron’s current phone menu. Somehow, it just seems funnier on the phone.

SatireWire announces that the FBI to Issue 5-Day Terror Forecasts…, which should add some level of organization to dealing with terror. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft stated:

<q>We in law enforcement are duty-bound to report inherent danger, so we will continue to alert the public to serious threats,“ said Ashcroft. “But we also understand how frustrating it is to organize a family picnic or corporate event, only to have it washed out by the late-breaking specter of impending doom. So... [More]

Mark Fiore of the SF Gate makes cartoons in Flash. He’s got one from February 6, 2002 called Lair that depicts the possible hiding location of the most sought after man in America.