Messy Lines

• A commenter challenged me to draw Africa. There is no way in hell I am going to do that. I will however show an image from a map of the world I drew "from memory" in 7th grade geography. This represents the apex of my knowledge of African cartography. It is pretty pathetic. I mean, 'Togo'? I'm pretty sure I made that up.
  
  All in all it was a pretty cool project. During the year we learned one continent at a time, and how to draw it on a completely blank page and get the orientation and relation of everything correctly. At the end of the year we did the entire globe on one big square in about a week. I can't say that everyone followed the spirit of the 'memory' challenge entirely, but we were not permitted simply to copy anything, or have a book in the room where we drew these, so I remembered it for at least some period of time. As you can tell from this, the final product was not without its mistakes, unintentional and intentional.


• Flash programming tools are apparently available to psych wards nowadays. This is good news, because if they weren't, this game wouldn't exist. "Game, game, game and again game; or belief systems are small clumsy rolling-type creatures" features 12 levels of creepy psychotic rambling fun. As you move your flashing rolling-type creature through the level, meaningless crazy text pops up inexplicably all over the screen, your score (a string of strange arrow-like symbols) steadily rises (or falls) unaffected by your actions, and paranoid scribblings criss-cross the background for no reason. I tried to quote mine it for some particularly salient example of this madness, but it simply wasn't possible, everything that pops up is equally good. Whether this was designed by a schizophrenic, or just made to look that way, it is clear that this person has a future doing Radiohead's web design. [via]
  


• The five-second rule appears to have some basis. This paper written of in this NY Times article, measured whether there are differences in bacteria pickup depending on how long food touches the ground. "Left for a full minute [instead of five seconds], slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood." The article also points out that 60% of people are aware of the rule, so we can at least be glad that we can at least get a majority of people to accept a scientific viewpoint, regardless of what it happens to be.[via]