Internet Detritus

Travel Time/Time Travel

Rates-of-travel-in-1800-625x824
One of those essential things history students (and teachers) need to keep coming back to. – via Flowing Data (which is good) via MNN (which I don’t like) who supposedly got the information from the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States which you can find here (although I haven’t found these maps yet).

Hedges

I never understood quite what was going on with hedges despite the fact that they’ve come up repeatedly in history courses and in literature. I just assumed they were dense rows of bushes. Now I know differently. Such a simple and effective way to build a fence.

Din Minimum


N0 = the critical number of guests above which each speaker will try overcome the background noise by raising his voice
K = the average number of guests in each conversational group
a = the average sound absorption coefficient of the room
V = the room’s volume
h = a properly weighted mean free path of a ray of sound
d0 = the conventional minimum distance between speakers
Sm = the minimum signal-to-noise ratio for the listeners

This equation is supposed to determine “How many guests can attend a cocktail party before it becomes too noisy for conversation?” It would be fun to mess around with equation based answers to other odd questions (validity mattering less than logical thought). It’d be fun to make equations like this for characters in books.

  • When does a hug become uncomfortable? (variables may include heat, attire, relationship to hugger, witnesses etc.)
  • How bad can food taste before I stop eating it? (variables may include time since last meal, relationship to the cook, etc.)

See the whole thing at Futility Closet

Just Interesting

Tommy Edison, a blind man, has an Instagram account and here is a video of him explaining how he uses it. There’s something really interesting about pictures taken entirely without the ability to see.

Google Search at the next level via Tony Hirst’s Delicious links. This is actually pretty good and worth looking at even if you’re good at Google.

2 thoughts on “Internet Detritus

  1. YES!!!! It’s officially a regular thing!

    This makes me so happy.

    And I never use exclamation points. In fact, I’ll probably be so embarrassed by those that I’ll come back and delete this comment in a few hours.

    Please don’t screenshot this comment for blackmail purposes. I won’t pay.

    Again: thank you.

    – Luke

    1. Luke-

      I appreciate the support, exclamation marks included. I will try to keep this going, we’ll see what happens now that work has returned. I think the change in RSS feeds will make it more likely.

      I will not pursue my blackmail options at this point in time.

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