I Can't Stop Playing with This
It's a cellular automaton-based sound generator and I can't make myself stop playing with it. Please help.
A Voyage is About to Begin
That is all.
The Stockholm Metro is Amazing
Stockholm probably has the most awesome metro of any city anywhere ever. Here are pictures. Look at them and be amazed.
These are all from awesome people on flickr. Alt text has full attributions.
I really like how they just didn't bother to hide all the rock that surrounds the subway station; they just integrated it into the design. This mostly just makes me sad though, because there aren't any subway systems in the United States that are this nice. Well, D.C.'s is close, but it's not nearly as cool as Stockholm's. Here are pictures of the D.C. metro; if you've played Fallout 3, you'll recognize the architecture.
Also from flickr.
2010 in Film
I just sat through the trailer for Marmaduke featuring Owen Wilson as a talking dog. Really, the last 15 seconds or so are the worst part.
Earth Apples, Anyone?
I was reading a recipe for some gross Dutch soup with potatoes in it when I noticed that the Dutch word for potato (aardappel) literally means "earth apple," just like the French "pomme de terre." The only other language I know how to say potato in is German (kartoffel), so I wondered how many words there were for it. It turns out that there are only three main ones: potato, earth apple, and truffle. I enjoyed learning about this, so maybe you will too.
So it looks like this mess is Spain's fault. When they brought potatoes back from Peru, the word they used to describe them was patata, a combination of the Taino batata (sweet potato) and the Quecha papa (potato). Because Spain's empire at the time was pretty big, we ended up calling the potatoes, same as in Portugese, Italian, Greek, Norwegian (potet), Swedish (potatis), and Turkish (patates). Arabic uses batata, which it got from Spanish but replaced the p since their alphabet doesn't have one.
