Pronunication challenge

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.  After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself at http://bertc.com/english.htm

Top 10 traits of highly successful people

Want to have a winning attitude and succeed at life? Philip Humbert has studied the habits of successful people and listed the top ten things he noticed they had in common. Check out the list at http://www.appleseeds.org/10%20traits-success.htm

Fancy a riddle?

A duck is in a circular pond with a menacing cat outside. The cat runs four times as fast as the duck can swim, but cannot enter the water. Can the duck get to the perimeter of the pond without the cat being on top of him? Check out this and other tough riddles at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/hard.shtml

Death by Caffeine

That's right, you can have too many coffees in the morning. How many is too many? The caffeine test at http://www.energyfiend.com/death-by-caffeine/ asks you for your drink of choice, and your body weight, and calculates how much of that drink will kill you. For example, if you weigh 80kgs, it will take 2407.45 glasses of chocolate milk to send you on your way.

Official Seal Generator

Want an official seal for your club or organisation? The Official Seal Generator at http://www.says-it.com/seal/index.php allows you to customise and generate your own seal image, and then you can visit Wikipedia to choose a Latin phrase (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases)

Interface Lift

The interface lift website hosts a variety of images, icons, fonts and themes for sprucing up your computer. Check out their amazing set of free desktop wallpapers at http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/index.php?sort=downloads The list is updated regularly and the wallpaper images are available in a variety of sizes to suit your desktop.

Roast your own

Speaking of coffee, why not learn to roast your own coffee beans? Chris and Camri McAvoy's webiste  "Tastebud Chicago" includes a page on their experiences roasting their own beans and links to a number of useful resources. Check it out at http://tastebudchicago.com/blog/roast-your-own-coffee/

The Treadmill Music Video

This music video is all the rage on the internet at the moment. Who would have thought that 4 guys with 8 treadmills could make a pretty entertaining music video? Check out http://media.skoopy.com/misc/treadmill/

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Apps for your Memory Stick

A USB memory stick is a small device you can use to store data. it's usually the size of a pack of chewing gum, and holds a varying amount data - some memory sticks can hold gigabytes of information. Memory sticks are useful because they are easy to transport, and most PCs and Macs support USB, meaning you can plug a memory stick into a computer and it will be recognised as a removeable storage device from which you can store and retrieve data. Most computer stores sell USB memory devices - a 2gb device costs around $130. App-Stick (http://www.app-stick.com) is a directory of free portable applications for your USB Memory Stick - now you can take your software with you as well.

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The Art of Memory

Edward Tanguay has been interested in memory techniques since 1985. He can now memorise a pack of cards in half an hour, and perform a number of other memory feats. He has summarised his techniques at http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~tanguay/memory_main.htm

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Naomi Novik

The Temeraire novels are a re-imagining of the epic events of the Napoleonic Wars, but with an air force - an air force of dragons, manned by crews of aviators. Peter Jackson has recently purchased the rights to these books for possible future development as feature films. You can find out more about Naomi and her books at http://www.temeraire.org/ She also maintains a LiveJournal blog at http://naominovik.livejournal.com/

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2 micron sky gallery

The Two Micron All Sky Survey is one of the most ambitious digital measurements of the sky ever made. Its final release will provide the astronomical community with over one million research-quality images. Check out some of the amazing images from the gallery at http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/gallery/showcase/index.html

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Gadgets for Girls

TechieDiva fills a void in the gadget blog arena by writing about technology for women. Here, females can satisfy their tech tastebuds with news and reviews on fashionable cell phones, laptop bags, Swarovski jeweled desk accessories, and more. Sign up for the newsletter to be included in giveaways automatically. Check it out at http://www.techiediva.blogs.com/

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Photonhead

Filled with tips, tricks, and tutorials, Photonhead is a great resource for newbies and not-so-newbies to digital photography. Photonhead covers choosing a camera, taking photos, and photo editing, and has a cool "SimCam," which lets you adjust shutter speed, aperture, and ISO on a test image and see the results as if it were a real camera. Check the site out at http://www.photonhead.com/ If you’re interested in discussing cameras and photography, and reading reviews on the latest cameras, check out http://www.dpreview.com/ (considered one of the top digital photography resources).

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Rock band names

If you’ve ever wondered how rock bands come up with their names, look no further than http://library.thinkquest.org/4626/rock.htm. For example, Pink Floyd took their name from the names of two Georgia bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council (in the early days Pink Floyd saw themselves as a blues band.)

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Why don't teenagers care?

If you ever sense teenagers are not taking your feelings into account, it's probably because they're just incapable of doing so. The area of the brain associated with higher-level thinking, empathy, and guilt is underused by teenagers, reports a new study. When considering an action, the teenage medial prefrontal cortex, located in front of the brain, doesn't get as much action as adults. Read the full article online at http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060907_teenage_feelings.html

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Vegiforms

Here's a way to make vegetables more fun (and maybe even convince children to eat them!). For growing novelty vegetables, these 1/8" thick, clear plastic forms are very effective. Just fix a mold over a growing vegetable, and the vegetable will conform to the shape of the mold. Available in the form of an elf for shaping eggplant, melon, pumpkin, and squash, or the "pickle pair", corncob or heart (makes heart-shaped cross sections when sliced) for use with cucumber, zucchini and summer squash. The molds can be used repeatedly. With zucchini, you can create a new shape every week. Check out http://www.vegiforms.com/

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Building a castle the old-fashioned way

For the next 20 years, thirty five craftsmen and women will be building a medieval Burgundy castle in the forests of Guedelon. They will only use authentic 13th century techniques. The natural site in the middle of the forest will provide them with all the building materials necessary : wood, water, stone, earth, sand and iron. Follow the progress of this amazing project at http://www.guedelon.com/uk/presentation/presentation.php

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Julian Beever's Pavement Art

Julian Beever has made pavement drawings for over ten years. He has worked in the U.K., Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Germany, the USA and Australia. The pavement drawings have included both renderings of old masters plus a wealth of original inventive pieces of work. Some of his most spectacular pieces are drawn in chalk - anamorphic illusions drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of 3 dimensions when seen from one particular viewpoint. Check out the galleries at http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm

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Geotagging with Flickr

Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) is great for uploading and exploring photos by photographer, tag, time, text and group, and now it's also great for exploring photos by place. Flickr have added a new feature called “Geotagging” which works with Google Maps to allow you to mark the location where your photos were taken. There are a couple of short video tutorials (or "screencasts") which give the 90 second overview on how to geotag your own photos ( http://www.flickr.com/help/screencasts/vol1) and how to use all the controls for searching and exploring geotagged photos ( http://www.flickr.com/help/screencasts/vol2). If you’re a Flickr user, you can jump right in to Geotagging your photos by visiting the Map tab in the Flickr Organizr ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/organize/?start_tab=map&show). Or to simply see Geotagged images, check out http://flickr.com/map

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The Perfect iTunes EQ Settings

We've all seen the EQ setting in iTunes, but not many of us know exactly how to use it to its full potential. Rich Tozzoli, Senior Editor of Surround Professional Magazine breaks each EQ slider down and helps you get the most out of your music. Visit http://www.methodshop.com/mp3/articles/ituneseq/ to read the full article.

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Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don't Want to Work at Writing

John Scalzi writes “What writing tips would you whisper to those who aren't aspiring professionals, but would like to write better? If I asked you about losing weight and you said ‘Diet and Exercise’ you'd be a) correct and b) ignored. So no ideas that take work. We want the quick fix! Tips like ‘Edit your work’ aren't useful. ‘Gerunds are your friend’ are.” Read his list of useful writing tips at http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004023.html

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The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially those from the 1950s. The premise is invariably to take something out of its usual context - making people small or something else (gorillas, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc.) large - and then play with the consequences. However, Hollywood's approach to the concept has been, from a biologist's perspective, hopelessly naive. Absolute size cannot be treated in isolation; size per se affects almost every aspect of an organism's biology. Indeed, the effects of size on biology are sufficiently pervasive and the study of these effects sufficiently rich in biological insight that the field has earned a name of its own: "scaling." Read more at http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/

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