Pratchett, 60, best known for his satirical Discworld fantasy series, becomes a knight, one of the queen's most important honours, and will now be addressed as a 'Sir'.
"There are times when phrases such as 'totally astonished' just don't do the job," he said. "I am of course delighted and honoured and needless to say, flabbergasted."
In other cultural contexts, this might seem something like a den of smut and vice - but Mr Nasser, a devout Muslim, insists it's more a public service and religious duty.
Olive often imagined there was an orchestra in her heart. Music heard only by her except when her heart broke open and it spilled out into the world.
...shows you how popular a Google search query is in each U.S. state, giving a ranking like the one you see in the left column. It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman's rank correlation.For instance, here are the states by popularity of searching for "God".
| Metric | Correlation with God |
|---|---|
| Obesity | 0.84 (Positive, strong) |
| InfantMortality | 0.65 (Positive, moderate) |
| EnergyConsumption | 0.51 (Positive, moderate) |
| VotedForBush | 0.47 (Positive, moderate) |
| Illiteracy | 0.41 (Positive, moderate) |
| Rainfall | 0.39 (Positive, weak) |
| ViolentCrime | 0.33 (Positive, weak) |
| Unemployment | 0.33 (Positive, weak) |
| Suicide | 0.08 (Positive, very weak) |
| Area | 0.07 (Positive, very weak) |
| PercentElderly | 0.06 (Positive, very weak) |
| Density | 0.04 (Positive, very weak) |
| Longitude | -0.02 (Negative, very weak) |
| Age | -0.21 (Negative, weak) |
| LifeExpectancy | -0.33 (Negative, weak) |
| SameSexCouples | -0.38 (Negative, weak) |
| Latitude | -0.45 (Negative, moderate) |
| Frost | -0.48 (Negative, moderate) |
| VotedForObama | -0.51 (Negative, moderate) |
| Income | -0.55 (Negative, moderate) |
| HighSchoolGrad | -0.67 (Negative, moderate) |
This is what we are writing about (omitting common English words and preformatted blogger junk).
The spotlight shines on the magician’s assistant. The woman in the tiny white dress is a luminous beacon of beauty radiating from the stage to the audience. The Great Tomsoni announces he will change her dress from white to red. On the edge of their seats, the spectators strain to focus on the woman, burning her image deep into their retinas. Tomsoni claps his hands, and the spotlight dims ever so briefly before reflaring in a blaze of red. The woman is awash in a flood of redness.Read the entire thing to get an explanation and a great deal more. There is a great deal of neurological trickery involved in magic, chief of which are the various species of inattentional blindness, as Richard Wiseman demonstrates:Whoa, just a moment there! Switching color with the spotlight is not exactly what the audience had in mind. The magician stands at the side of the stage, looking pleased at his little joke. Yes, he admits, it was a cheap trick; his favorite kind, he explains devilishly. But you have to agree, he did turn her dress red—along with the rest of her. Please, indulge him and direct your attention once more to his beautiful assistant as he switches the lights back on for the next trick. He claps his hands, and the lights dim again; then the stage explodes in a supernova of whiteness. But wait! Her dress really has turned red. The Great Tomsoni has done it again!
The trick and its explanation by John Thompson (aka the Great Tomsoni) reveal a deep intuitive understanding of the neural processes taking place in the spectators’ brains—the kind of understanding that we neuroscientists can appropriate for our own scientific benefit.
Ain't It Cool News has a lengthy interview with Spike Jonze about his next movie, Where the Wild Things Are.Glue (formerly BlueOrganizer), connects you with friends around things you visit! Glue works automatically as you browse popular sites about books, music, movies, wines, restaurants, gadgets, stocks, actors, tv shows and other everyday things around the web.
The Glue Bar appears right on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought!
Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel.Here is a Corporations by Political Contributions visualization made in Flare.
Here's what happened to me. One slow Sunday afternoon, a man comes out of the restroom with a pearl necklace in his hand. "Found it on the bathroom floor" he says. He followed with "Geez, looks nice-I wonder who lost it?" Just then, the gas station's phone rings and a man asked if anyone found a pearl necklace that he had purchased as a gift for his wife. He offers a $200 reward for the necklace's return. I tell him that a customer found it. "OK" he says, "I'll be there in 30 minutes." I give him the ARCO address and he gives me his phone number. The man who found the necklace hears all this but tells me he is running late for a job interview and cannot wait for the other man to arrive.Here is a video of the pigeon drop in action:
...
We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.This is a great application of prediction and trend analysis that is open to the benevolent(ish) dictators at Google. They have terabyte upon terabyte of our search data that analysts, marketers and many others put to less humane ends, so it nice to see something like this once and a while.
But this camera is probably the best advance in cinema photography in the last 50 years. Going digital wasn't worth it until now.
That is a picture of NOPPON (ノッポン) the official mascot for the Tokyo Tower.
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans.
HBO has ordered a pilot based on George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, and probably the rest of the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series. (Variety's report and George R.R. Martin's blog.)
And:
I miss it now...