The Stockholm Metro is Amazing

june 17th, 2010 at 8:05 pm

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.

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2010 in Film

april 3rd, 2010 at 8:59 pm

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.

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Earth Apples, Anyone?

january 19th, 2010 at 12:51 am

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.

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Setting up GeekTool on OS X

october 12th, 2009 at 4:32 pm

GeekTool is a pretty awesome little utility for OS X; it lets you display arbitrary data on your desktop. This could be the output of a shell command, the contents of a file, or even an image. I've been using it for a while now, so I thought I'd share my setup.

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River Crabs and Mud Horses

october 5th, 2009 at 1:41 am

I got bored a couple days ago and started reading random Wikipedia articles, something I find myself doing far too often. I ended up reading about China's censorship of the internet and its 30,000+ internet police. Basically, China has been censoring anything that might hurt the CPC, including the following:

1. Inciting to resist or breaking the Constitution or laws or the implementation of administrative regulations;
2. Inciting to overthrow the government or the socialist system;
3. Inciting division of the country, harming national unification;
4. Inciting hatred or discrimination among nationalities or harming the unity of the nationalities;
5. Making falsehoods or distorting the truth, spreading rumors, destroying the order of society;
6. Promoting feudal superstitions, sexually suggestive material, gambling, violence, murder;
7. Terrorism or inciting others to criminal activity; openly insulting other people or distorting the truth to slander people;
8. Injuring the reputation of state organs;
9. Other activities against the Constitution, laws or administrative regulations.

My favorite recent example is what they did for the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square protests: they declared it "National Server Maintenance Day."

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