What I Learned Today . . .two...

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'Red on Women Drives Men Wild' ...who would have thought..??

Image source: mx5tx/Michael via flickr dot com

A University of Rochester study, detailed online at LiveScience dot com, demonstrated that men found that:

...women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colors.

But nowhere in the article did I find mention of the color black. I have always found the classic basic black dress a 'killer' look for my mind...



...and a video by the little-known Mexican-American pop singer Marcos Hernandez.





...tom...
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My desktop, October 28, 2008...

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Photo courtesy of The Big Picture: Days of Autumn, October 15, 2008


...tom...
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latest 'sign of the end times'...

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Noted without comment: Emoticons have infested your gmail account.


...tom...
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Color my world...

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No, no, no. Not the old rock tune by Chicago.

But a way to recharge my world by tuning into a favorite color on the web. I really could have used this 'color search engine' when I was blogging about orange a few weeks ago.


ideeinc.com (ee-day') is a recent find (for me anyway, from another blog) of a company specializing in image searches on the web.

To quote their webpage:

We extracted the colours from 10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.

Using their 'Multicolr Search Lab' page you can select from one to ten different colors from a color palette and the site returns hundreds of image matches for any combination chosen from the Creative Commons images on flickr dot com.



Looking for some images colored strongly orange and black for Halloween..??





Or perhaps something more sunny and bright for these chilly fall days. How 'bout some blue and yellow..??





If you are ever looking for a picture with a certain color ...or a color for a certain mood ...this image/color search tool will serve you very well.


Gotta run; got 10 million images to browse...


...tom...
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Kumbaya . . . pass the s'mores please..!!

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Kumbaya. Pass the s'mores and the hot chocolate.

Together we can sing songs and make the world a better place.





I like the music, the thoughts are nice.

Too bad it is a nasty world out there. Too bad too many 'bad people' have no intention of every acknowledging the validity of these ideas ... let alone accepting them or allowing them to be expressed or enforced.


What to do, what to do.

... I know, lets make a video..!!


For the less cynical: Human Rights Action Center dot org

Hat tip: Effect Measure

...tom...
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my ebbflux capacitor is discharged...

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There is no refinement. There is only process, action, and circumstance.

In response to an offsite question about what the heck the subject of this post was about, an online friend sent me the link to yet another odd 'words' page. As I suggested to him, it is not nice to point me at another shiny online bauble that makes me lose all concentration and purpose in my life.




ebbflux dot com. When you enter the site a random sentence is loaded:

Cupid’s arrow (I’m talking about the reindeer).

One word, or repeated word, will hyperlink to a following page. In the example above 'reindeer' is linked. Following it gives us:

If that was indeed the direction of the corpus. Because I’m pretty sure information is not currently being collected. A throwback from a simpler time. It’s all throwbacks from similar times.

Following a few links produces:

It wasn’t written to anyone’s satisfaction, in particular. Cuidado con los fluidos mi amigo.

I waited between them floating in and out of perception, never sinking in, and never quite seen.

There’s more. It’s okay. I call it a click aesthetic. It comes in sideways and half the time you just swipe your card through the ceiling. Hold on.

OK . . .why..??

Following the 'Notes' link on the page leads to the statement:

ebbflux's "machine text" is an experimental fiction in a hypertext format. Story generation is non-linear but not entirely random. The reader plays an interactive role setting the tone and direction of presentation through their choice of hypertext clickthroughs.

OK.... Some pages do have multiple links, and they do lead to different 'daughter' pages. But it sure as the heck does not make for much of a story.

I suppose the individual sentences/thoughts could be used as writing prompts for writing exercises. But beyond that I am drawing a blank.


Anyway, just another weird thing found on the web. If any of you have a clue about this one ... please do clue me in.



Oh, and one 'pretty' thought I found:

Clarity, like water floating oil globs, dissipates as the soapiness of reality drips in.

Image source: ReneS via flickr.com

...tom...
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OK . . .why..??

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All Junky Pages Intentionally Illogical & Inconsistent

scepticism enjoy vote confiner playacting preferentially floodlit Neil zygotic beneficial Savoy yo amativeness Georgia unobtrusively egocentrically slyly globulous benchwarmer quadrennia cob midsummer Chiapas jeep loft caesium tonically headwind incredulously recondite grisly Passamaquoddy neonatology overspent matchwood millibar shibboleth chew Ellice spend derisiveness glutei sweeping jack indemnity miffy grantee Beerbohm misshape malted transpacific layette estimably enunciator stance sizzlingly devastator solemnization electrochemical pinnacle Lauren chauvinistically timeserver castigation Tunis marathoning pedagogics monogamy burial Alberta psychosomatic Adolph conduct unprepossessing Cronus reveler relief perishable destructible seriffed futurist mightily Cucuta voraciously oatcake manumission defector crawly eloper Odin attunement extremeness rumbler soiree compressibility voluntarily serrated unbelievingly
...

..??

Literally hundreds (if not thousands) of pages each with a couple of thousand words listed. All unrelated, all 'real' words ...not gibberish, all correctly spelled ...from a quick skim through anyway.

Image source: Daino 16 via stock.xchng

Just one of those silly things that makes me go 'hmmm..?!?'


...tom...
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Feeling totally liberated...

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My name is ...tom... and I am a blogaholic.


Not necessarily from the writing side, obviously, but from the reading side. Clicking here and there I am constantly clicking this RSS feed button and that RSS feed button. Feeding the insatiable appetite of my Google Reader beast.

Opening it just now I see I have nine folders created. Within those nine folders are 77 separate feeds.

How in the h3ll did I wind up with 77 feeds..?!?

Hey, they are all free I guess.


Anyway, after having not been online for several days, or at least into my reader, I found myself with 700-plus posts to read.






What 700-plus reader messages feel like...

Image source: lidyalidya's flickr photostream

I struggled through a hundred or so, finding none of them worthy of 'starring' for a closer look later. So I finally said 'the h3ll with it' and clicked the '[Mark all as read]' button.


I am free..!! Gawd, how liberating is that..?!? Sure I might have missed the post of the year by gawd knows who . . .. But I guess the sun will still rise tomorrow and hopefully I will be here to greet it.







What having zero posts to read feels like..!!

Image source: utnapistim's flickr photostream

Anyway, the few blogs I really need or want to read are already marked here at my blog site so I guess I can live without all the filler/noise. OK ... maybe this once I can.


Hey, I am off to find some more blogs to subscribe to..!!


...tom...
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The view from above...

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It should be enough that I pimp it in my blog list here.

It should be enough that I have already featured it with a 'shout out post' when I first discovered it earlier this year.

It should be enough that it is one of my first 'read checks' every day.

It should be enough that you should already know about it...


But just in case you remain clueless . . ..


Earth From Above comes to NYC.

Wow.


Icebergs and an Adelie penguin, Adelie Land, Antarctica.



American cemetery north of Verdun, Meuse, France.



Elephants in the Okavango Delta, Botswana.


Looking now, at the draft of this post, I see the sample pics above capture none of the power or the intimacy of the photos at The Big Picture site.

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So just trust me on this one.

Go look for yourself.

Now.

You can thank me later.


...tom...
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Graphing your thoughts about you...

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The innertubes are full of widgets and games and 'which fill-in-the-blank are you..??' quizzes. There are countless ways to waste precious minutes to learn one more way to define just who the heck you are. What is with this 'defining ourselves' anyway..??


An 'exercise' I stumbled across recently is fun and different. Sponsored by The College Board (yes, the people who tortured you and now torture two million college-bound HS-ers each year with the SAT college exams) it is a simple way of weighing the significance of two pairs of choices on a 2D grid.














The example above pairs the choices of 'memorization vs comprehension' against 'verbal vs visualization'. (Click on any of the images for the bigger pic.) By sliding your mouse pointer across the face of the grid you can weigh your own balance between each pair of choices. The sample dot on the example above is obviously weighted much more heavily to memorization and almost as much to verbal for the styles of 'how you learn'.

Once you find your 'sweet spot' for any given graph and click to mark your place, the flash application fills in spots marking the choices of all those who have already completed that particular question grid. See the example below.













The simple flash program is found at the For Students page of the College Board site. No registration is required, you are simply given a cutesy 'user name' ( BrownCrownedMinnow here.. ) and away you go.


One more example of a fun one found there:

Love is: 'cruel vs wonderful' against 'attainable vs a myth'



I guess we should be encouraged that young people are finding love both 'wonderful' and 'attainable'. Though I suppose we should fear for that cluster hugging the 'cruel' line...






Anyway . . .a fun diversion for a few minutes during your day. Gawd knows we could all use a 'fun diversion' these days.

Click the links, check it out a bit, have some fun.


...tom...
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