[insert witty title]

This is probably the best roadsign I have ever seen:

It got a smile out of me pretty much every time I drove past it. Have you seen any better roadsigns?

Just because multiple people have complained about the creepy-ass gibbon gif having been at the top of the blog for months on end…

…[insert witty title] will return in the very near future.

I noticed today that my knowledge of hats was pretty lacking, so I resolved to fix it. See how well you do on my hat mega-quiz, Name Dat Hat!

Answers to appear in the comments section soon.

Being back in the UK for a while I decided to visit the ruins of a nearby Roman fort called Housesteads. I have visited Housesteads before, last time it was a summer afternoon and I remember being distinctly unimpressed. Something about a pile of old rocks being swarmed by ice cream licking, screaming toddlers and crotchety stumbling geriatrics reminds me more of a day at Butlins than a nice hike around some history.

This week, however, it was the middle of winter (and bloody cold) and it was a weekday. We had the entire place to ourselves and it was really beautiful, pretty much unrecognisable as the midsummer tourist hole I remember. I’m really no photographer, but I am really happy with how these came out:

Really, this post is just an advert for the new Photos page on the blog, which automatically interfaces with my Flickr account and mirrors everything here!

Babydrome! With a name like Babydrome I’m imagining what goes on inside to be something between David Lynch’s 1983 film Videodrome (where Videodrome is a sadistic, plotless program that depicts only torture and murder in a bright orange room) and the 1985 post-apocalyptic thriller Mad Max: Thunderdome (two men enter, one man leaves the thunderdome).

Sadly I think that the truth is somewhat less interesting, and besides, I’m scared to investigate further in case I get dragged into a horrifying, shadowy world of Dutch death-sports.

…What the A-Team’s van would look like if they were absolute white trash

(click to embiggen)

Just in case you can’t make out what is airbrushed on the side of the van, here is a closeup:

(click me for largeness)

There was also a picture airbrushed on the other side; it was of an implausibly muscular man, wielding an electrified axe and slaughtering undead. The (I assume) owners of the van were stood nearby, they looked _exactly_ like Wayne and Garth out of Wayne’s World, except obese. From an inspection based entirely on the photographs above, and my own brief glimpse of the owners I would say that they were both into the following things: 1) Iron Maiden 2) World of Warcraft 3) Posting on internet forums about Conan the Barbarian 4) Driving the white-trash mobile around Holland

Bonus picture: A car dealership called “Munters” (explanatory link for non-brits)

SHIT

these guys are living the dream

When I completely lose my mind, quit science, and live in a cave on a mountain for a I’m going to learn arbosculpture, because this is really really awesome

Recently I stumbled over a piece of software called Comic Life, a tool for making comics easily and quickly. It makes one very bold claim:

Yep, that’s right. It seems that running my everyday photos through Comic Life will result in a page of “LOL!!! :-P”

…I have no choice now but to find out if this is indeed the case. Results forthcoming.

Each and every one of these inventions is awesome:

(via zuzafun)

A while ago now I talked about some awesome maps of the world, in which the size of each country was stretched until it was proportional to different quantities (e.g. homicide rate, amount of imports of alcohol). here is the original post.

In the intervening month the Worldmapper team have been busy and there are very many new and incredibly interesting maps to look at. for reference here is the undistorted map of the world:

Now it is distorted so that each country has a size proportional to the number of people who demonstrated against the Iraq invasion (15.9 million in total):

Why hello thar Europe.

This map is distorted to show the number of native plant species:

I always assumed that Africa had the most native plant species, turns out that I was wrong.

Here is the number of operational nuclear weapons:

No real surprises there, although I never realized that the UK and France were the only European countries to have nuclear weapons.

Anyway, the maps are great fun and I heartily recommend that everybody goes and takes a look at the world in a slightly different way.

When I was little we had a tropical fish tank, with a little black film thermometer. They look a bit like this:

As the temperature increases a gradually larger array of coloured squares begin to appear on the thermometer (only the bottom three are visible on this one). An occasional childhood game was to try and use friction from my thumb to light all of the squares. I’m sure it’s something I’d also like to try today, but sadly I’m too lazy to go to the pet shop and get one.

Well, it turns out I’m not the only person who likes these things and somebody had the idea of putting the same chemicals into wall tiles. It makes for one badass (if somewhat cheesy) shower:

I’d seriously like to know how much this costs.

Disclaimer: OK this is my blog and so sometimes I’m allowed to be self indulgent and not feel too guilty about it! This is one of those times. You have been warned

The BBC is currently showing a documentary series called The Cosmos: A Beginner’s Guide, billed as a documentary that

asks big questions about the universe: How was it made? Are we alone? What’s the furthest thing we can see? Is there another earth somewhere? Where is the most exciting place to explore? In each programme, we take on one huge idea, and head for the place most likely to provide an answer.

Part of the second program (Building the universe) looked at recent progress in computer simulations of cosmology and galaxy formation. Sandwiched in between interviews with eminent professors there is footage of me (left) and my erstwhile PhD supervisor (right), sat at my desk pondering the mysteries of the Universe:

Badass! Although sadly my claim to fame isn’t as good as those in the comments of this post

Every time the camera was pointed at me I tried to make myself look more intelligent by putting my hand near my chin, like Rodin’s The Thinker. Unfortunately trying to make me look clever is a task on a par with polishing a turd.

I just found these pictures from a moon landing on my hard drive, they are fascinating:

After a bit of digging around I discovered that these were the Apollo 17 astronauts: Eugene Cernan, Ronald E. Evans and Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt. It is really striking how different these pictures are than their professionally shot publicity photos:

We should note that the astronauts aren’t crying, their eyes are red because moon dust is incredibly fine, gets inside of spacesuits and irritates the eyes.

STAT