You can join the competition for the beard holding the largest number of wooden toothpicks:

2222 toothpicks in a single beard!

If you feel a pinch, don’t accuse the beard!

In order to stay on the competition field, there was this beard contest in Alaska in May 2009. The new champion: David Traver.

Isn’t it a nice beard?

But must must also know when to be serious about beards. This is why “The Language of the Beard“, published in 1913 in London, presented (and ranked) poets by the mass of their beard.

John Burroughs

John Burroughs (1837 – 1921)
Beard type: Claus-esque
Typical opus: Waiting
Gravity (UPI rating): 43

But I was also mentioned a darker side of beards in our society so afraid of terrorism.

But some wanted to tell us about the more troubling side of beards in our society now permanently afraid of the possibility of terrorism.

So, there is no surprise in seeing super-heroes (this epitome of the American popular culture) turning to beards (would you recognize them?):

Last but not least, shouldn’t I mention the attention drawn to facial hair in Mafia Wars (the online game in Facebook)? There, you can collect beards, barber tools, etc.

Source: Software Engineering Tips.

20 foods you should not eat together

You can’t read Chinese? That’s a pity. You would learn from this official announcement that some foods should not be eaten together (it is not clear how the exact risk was identified, though).

According to Xinjiang, the list of terrible mixtures is:

1. Pork + water chestnuts = a stomach ache
2. Beef + chestnuts = vomiting
3. Lamb meat + watermelon = a decreased vigor for life
4. Dog meat + green beans = poisonous to the body
5. Rabbit meat + celery = loss of hair
6. Chicken + celery = a decreased vigor for life
7. Goose meat + chicken eggs = a decreased vigor for life
8. Turtle meat + amaranth (a nutritional herb) = poisonous to the body
9. Carp + liquorice (not the candy) = poisonous to the body
10. Crab + persimmon fruit = diarrhea
11. Chicken eggs + saccharin = poisonous to the body, potentially fatal
12. Brown sugar + preserved eggs = poisonous to the body
13. White wine (白酒) + persimmon = chest pains
14. Onions + honey = damaged vision
15. Radish + fungus = dermatitis (a skin disease)
16. Bean curd + honey = makes you deaf
17. Potatoes + bananas = (not translated)
18. Bananas + sweet potato = a bloated belly
19. Peanuts + cucumbers = harmful to the body
20. Sweet potatoes + persimmon = lithiasis (formation of stones, such as the kidney stone)

I knew that you wanted to know about it…

Found in an article of DownloadSquad:

• ImgBurn
• CDBurner XP which still is my prefered solution (by far) in the CD/DVD burning category
• InfraRecorder
• NCH ExpressBurn
• Burn CDCC

Knowledge is always free.

Some of our pets can become heroes or -at least- be more unusual than we would think. The Pet Blog collected a series of astonishing histories about cats high moments, like:

• Oscar a.k.a. “Unsinkable Sam”
• Simon, of the Royal Navy
• The Alamo Cat
• Fred, the undercover secret agent
• Tama, train station master

Source: The Pet Blog.

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Good luck trying them all.

• The Scotch Malt Whisky Guide, with an excellent little historic guide to whisky that is perfectly written for those who discover this strong alcohol.
• the web site of the Scotch Whisky Association if you want to share your passion with other amateurs.

But this is not enough for some people (real alcohol geeks). Wired discovered that true US amateurs are pushing sunday afternoon distillery in a country where moonshine is still prohibited. It’s quite easy, and the result is supposed to be very good.

The next one is located at the top of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. It’s a small zone of complete quietness in the middle of furious liquid torrent.

For more about this strange location: Fogonazos.

For this last one, excentricity is in the photo itself. Not the pool.

• Five important security apps for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
• Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software
• The Windows Apps You Never Need To Install
• Battle of the Free Windows Software Firewalls; We have to admit that there is no longer any good reason to pay for your computer security under Windows.
• Top 100 of the Best (Useful) OpenSource Applications
• Logiciels gratuits from TutoWeb.
• Now, to look into the future, Sneak peek at OpenOffice.org 3.0
• And, last but not least, for old dinosaurs, let’s remind you that you can still use VAX-VMS on your Linux PC. If you don’t know what I am saying, either you’re too young, or you never received a hacker education. Or both.

Hollywood in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s created a long string of cheap horror movies that never reached the top rating lists. However, some of them, despite being left mostly abandonned by their authors, are worthy of some renewed attention. In this context, it is interesting to notice that the Internet Archive has recently pointed to a nice list of these B horror movies. In there, you will find (available for free download):

• Attack of the Giant Leeches
• Attack of the Killer Mushrooms
• Horrors of Spider Island
• Killers from Space
• Bloody Pit of Horror
• The Satanic Rites of Dracula
• Werewolf of Washington
• Killer Shrews
• The Giant Gila Monster

Interestingly, this statement allows to believe that by June 2008 the list will have grown to 1 million terrorists in the US of A. I believe that Americans can be silly, but I doubt that one out of 230 is a dangerous moron attempting to end western civilization next time he or she will take a plane.

I suggest that you have a look at the astonishing list of “unlikely suspects” displayed in this article from ACLU. It includes US Senators and US Congressmen (and their spouses), war heroes, John Does with a common name, dead 9/11 hijackers, foreign presidents (dead as Saddam Hussein or alive like Evo Morales), pop star singers and toddlers.

Vertical urban farm

Imagined by the environmentalist researchers of Columbia University. More details [PDF].

Cubes piled in Singapour

More than 1000 flats for Singapour. Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Round Center at the Harbour

The Science Center in the city of Hamburg. Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

A monad in Moscou

450m-high project for the the world’s highest building. Crystal Island in Moscow, from Foster + Partners.

But if you really want to fly high, you must also look at Tokyo (previous article). This is no longer an issue of meters, but kilometers (and one million inhabitants).

But this kind of ambition is not absolutely new. Only, in North Korea, human ambition (or is it hubris) is limited by some physical/practical constraints: Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang went up to the 22nd rank for the highest building in the world. But it was never finshed, never occupied, and is still an impressive monument to the failures of the North Korean communist regime.

Slanted museum

Daniel Libeskind is finishing an extension, not warped but slanted, to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

Curvy crystal for Varsaw

The Lilium Tower is a 250m project for the city of Warsaw in Poland. Zaha Hadid Architects.

Grassy roof cover

In Nanyang Technological University (Singapore again), people love grass. So much that they put it on the roof of the School of Art, Design and Media. Neatorama.

Unbuilding from the bottom

But, in the end, building must die too. This one is in London and is being destroyed from the bottom up because its floors are hooked to a central column and held from the top floor with steel cables. Daily Mail.

Conclusion

After all, these building photos, showing all their intimate details, are what is the nearest to pure architect porn!

1. If the hero starts dancing, suddenly, everybody around knows the steps and dance with them.
2. Any car hit by a bullet immediately explodes in a cloud of flames, a mere rivulet of oil turns into a fire ball.
3. An ugly girl only has to remove her glasses and untie her hair to transform herself into an iridescent beauty queen.
4. If you look languorously into the eyes of a woman, music always starts to play (even if there is no stereo in the room). Ain’t it handy?
5. In car pursuits, you only have to zip through crossroads for all others to halt in tire shrieks. No need to check the traffic lights…
6. In car pursuits, you just need to speed up to fly over wide gaping spaces (gravity seems nullified provided that you can push the pedal hard enough!)
7. The first truncheon hit systematically sends the bad guy either to sleep or flying through the room like a ball on a pool table.
8. The hero will only yield to baddies after dozens of hits by a large group of hulking champion weight-lifters.
9. All computers are fifteen years ahead of current technology and blinkingly beautiful (no dull grey boxes, but nice blinking lights or impressive 3D graphics interface).
10. Baddies are always easy to recognize in a crowd. They are ugly, dirty and grimacing (if not with a scar on the face). Why doesn’t the police use this kind of clue in movies while the same kind of profiling is used routinely in our streets?
11. When the hero enters an unknown derelict space ship, he has no difficulty finding and operating the door lock, the ship’s controls and the hyper-space radio.
12. When we see a distant explosion on screen, the sound is never late (is speed of sound as fast as speed of light in movies?).
13. Radio-activity makes objects glow in the dark (it’s useful since we wouldn’t see it – Many scientists including Pierre and Marie Curie would have wanted to know that they just had to switch off the light in their laboratories!)
14. In the void of empty space, sounds are deafening: Shrieking spaceship rockets can be heard from the other end of the galaxy despite the total lack of atmosphere to transmit it.
15. A detective cannot solve a case before he has been suspended for insubordination
16. Even when the road is straight, if you drive a car, you must continuously swing the wheel right and left
17. The wounds of the hero will not make him even wince, except when a gorgeous woman is trying to clean them

• Collège de France : the most famous French scientific institution has free-access lectures all year long. Most of them are available online too (from Mathematics to Philosophy through Archeology).
• The MIT publishes a number of lectures in video-on-demand (and has a large web site named OpenCourseWare).
• OpenYale is presenting seven free introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
• Courses of all levels from the Washington University (introductory, undergraduate, graduate).
• PodCasts from UC San Diego
• Lectures from Vanderbilt.
• Computer and Computer Graphics, from University of British Columbia or from Virginia U.
• Webcasts from Oxford Internet Institute.
• Webcasts from Rice University.
• Podcasts from York College (NYC).
• Harvard at Home.

I could also advise you to check the Lecturefox Blog with a lot of information about these free lectures.

Pamela Anderson

Homer Simpson

Mickey Mouse

Elmo was sent to Guantanamo

And finally, a bag meant to ensure that’ll get trouble the next time you go to an airport:

Ring Flash for a penny

For macro-photography and proxi-photography, a flash is often needed. But it is difficult to obtain a nice light not simply coming from the side (and casting ugly shadows). This is why exist those ring flashes that are usually so expensive.

Today, Strobist provides a neat little idea to make nearly free ring flash out of a common cobra flash. Just use a circle (more precisely, an ellipse) of cardboard or white metal to reflect the light of a more common flash light (see the image below). In seconds, you’ll get most of the advantages of a ring flash without changing your equipment.

The flash light comes from the side and is reflected toward the scene while the hole in the middle allow the lens to peer naturally into the scene.

Poor man’s steadycam

You may know that a steady-cam is a simple rig that allows to stabilize a video camera for use while walking or running. It is so essentially simple that Johnny Lee made one out of three metal pipes and a weight. It is much nicer than the expensive pro ones and you can easily copy the design if you do not want to pay for the 39$ he asks for it.

Older issues

If you have been attentive, you can remember that there were similar other ideas popping up in these pages before.

• Poor man’s light photo tripod
• Poor man’s fish eye lens

The first solution (and certainly the best one) is to ask experts. You can go to the nearest University, but the Internet made it even easier with the appearance of many amateur forums with an impressive collective knowledge. Some are so precise and helpful that the best experts may pale in comparison. We’ll come back to it. There are other solutions too.

First, I decided to work all by myself. Failing to write down all the information provided by the guide during the safari (note to myself: next time, bring a small paper notebook), I had to find a large and good source of reference images for the animals I was interested into. With a minimal knowedge and some personal work, a lot of identification can be done like that without too many errors if you stayed concentrated on checking all details in bird feathers and colors (and, sometimes, note : “Right! Noam told us this one was a…”).

For Brazilian birds, I used mainly two good sources: Arthur Grosset’s Birds and Oiseaux.net. The first is in English and contains an astonishing amount of data, surprisingly coming from one guy only. The second is in French and is the result of cooperation on a common project where there are description, photos, living regions, etc.

Like so many collaborative Internet sites, there are surprising holes and it is a work-in-progress. But for all common species, endemic species and even some rare ones, the information is very detailed and precise. Often enough to cross-check and identify firmly the animal. Text comments may be needed to support the small differences between two similar birds, when it all lays in photo details not easy to spot.

Let’s add a remark: recent changes in classification categories and names, recent splits and regrouping of existing species often create some added diffiulties. Finally, names are quite different from one country to the next (not only from one language to the next). So, it may happen that a single birds has several names. Beware!