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Best Of 2006
Best of the Web 2006
Our Favorite Humor and Fun Discoveries

Stellarium

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Quoted from Stellarium site:

"Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go."

This program is free. It is a work of art. It is truely beautiful and breathtaking.

If you have not tried this before, than please take an hour of your time and give it a try!



The Universe Within - very cool flash image zooms from galaxy to atoms

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View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

http://micro.magnet....owersof10/index.html


Cool interactive visualization of music relationships and social networks

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Afterwards, we used the user ratings to compute the similarity between the artists. Essentially, for each pair of artists, we counted the number of users that rated both artists highly to determine the similarity. This operation gave us the artist-artist similarity graph. In the image below, we show the clustered adjacency matrix of the graph. The blocks you see in the middle of the picture are similar groups of artists. (In fact, this is how we got the color for each artist in the final picture.)


http://www.stanford....fmusic/interact.html


10 minute video of Japanese Rube Goldberg Machines

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This is a really lovely collection of tons of videos of rube goldberg machines (elaborate contraptions usually featuring a ball moving through some intricate devices).

Bet you can't watch just 10 - they are addicting.

http://www.youtube.c...arch=Rube%20Goldberg


Tonight show phony photo booth.

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Tonight show phony photo booth.
"It's amazing how far people will go for one free photo"

Check this out: http://www.youtube.c...=357&s=B4BC767524043

New Links: http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=X-PQY9ntAJo (#6)

More (dif videos):
http://www.nbc.com/V...os/Hi_3032_msn.shtml
http://www.nbc.com/n...Jay_Leno/highlights/


Big List of Programming Games

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http://www.aiforge.net/game-links.htm

This is a big list of programming related games like Core War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Wars).


Massive collection of dynamic image generators (add text to image)

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Massive collection of dynamic image generators (add text to image)

http://www.customsigngenerator.com


Animator vs Animation - one of the best flash animations i've seen in years.

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Animator vs Animation - Amazing flash animation
this is really brilliant and beautiful.. one of the best flash animations i've seen in years.

http://abum.com/file...animations/17632.swf


Rock Paper Scissors 25 - an old game, a very cool twist

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Seriously, things like this tell me there is still hope for this world of ours.
this takes the rock-paper-scissors game idea to a whole new level.  pure genius.

9/25/05: After receiving 100+ letters in the past two weeks (mostly) raving about RPS-15 and including lots of ideas for more gestures, and also with so many requests to incorporate gestures from other popular bastardizations of RPS, I elected to cap this whole nightmarishly ridiculous endeavor with an Earth-swallowing 25-gesture game. This is it...I swear I am done now.
...

http://www.umop.com/rps25.htm


Extremely cool visualization of global statistics over time.

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Google and Gapminder have gotten together to create a very cool graphing visualizer of a bunch of interesting world statistics. And the coolest part is you can graph it over time and actually watch as the stats change! Compare average lifespan to number of physicians per capita and see if doctors really make us live longer - then watch the graph change over up to 50 years of data. Cool stuff. :)

http://tools.google.com/gapminder/


Zidane's head butt mashup videos

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You may have heard about the headbutt that zidane got red-carded for at the last match of the world cup.  Well people have been making little video cartoon versions of it that can be quite amusing:

http://maxt.dk/archi...-final-bow/#more-324


Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager - see how choices of of names change in time

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Explore the sea of names, letter by letter...watch trends rise and fall, and dive in deeper to see your favorite name's place in the historical tides.
The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America's name choices. Start with a "sea" of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you'll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name's changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.
...

http://www.babynamew...voyager/lnv0105.html


Humans recreate Space Invaders in a lecture hall (video)

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this is too damn cool!
you youngsters who don't know what space invaders are.. wiki it..

http://www.notsonois...einvaders/video.html


"Maps" of Cyberspace

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Topology Maps of Elements of Cyberspace

A screenshot of a 3D model of the vBNS network which connects universities and laboratories in the USA. The model was created by Jeff Brown, a researcher at MOAT, National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR), USA, using his Cichlid data visualisation software. The model is animated to show how traffic flows over the links.

More information on their work can be found in the paper "Network Performance Visualization: Insight Through Animation" by J.A. Brown, McGregor A.J and H-W Braun.

http://www.cybergeog.../atlas/topology.html


Be the author of a scientific paper

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This generator does a remarkable job of creating a scientific paper with the proper structure while containing gibberish. The result certainly feels like some of the papers I had to struggle through at university :D

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

(This find was shamelessly stolen from kimsnarf, who found it here:
http://glinden.blogs...-spam-at-airweb.html)


Invisible Bike And Other Cat Signs

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For your daily laugh.. Some of these are so good..

http://www.knitemare...ats/index.php?type=1



Very cool story about an elaborate "virtual heist" in a multiplayer online game

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This is an extremely cool story about an elaborate "virtual heist" in an online multiplayer game that illustrates how elaborate the social structures in these massively multiplayer onling roleplaying games can be.

Thank god for color scanners. MMODIG refers us to this simply amazing PC Gamer article by Tom Francis about a simply amazing PvP coup/heist pulled off in Eve Online (which is a game I find simply amazing anyway).

Through a months-long ruse, one player corporation infiltrated another top to bottom, assassinated its CEO (who had a bounty on her head) and made off with about $16,500 worth of virtual goods. Francis's story chronicles the heist and provides great insight into what makes Eve such a rich galaxy.

The thing that's so great about the piece (besides its being written in a serious narrative style that completely works) is that it illustrates the best thing about MMORPGS: the complex social interactions that can spring up within them. Despite a couple of people who will cry that this constitutes some kind of real-world theft, everything that happened was well within both the letter of Eve law (i.e., the Terms of Service) and the stated aims of the game. It was a despicable act by a known criminal organization, but this is exactly the kind of sophisticated PvP conflict Eve is meant to generate. The fact that things like this are happening in the game is testament to the success of its design.....

http://www.walkering.../simply_amazing.html


CUTE OVERLOAD will make your head explode

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Somehow I found Cute Overload in the realms world wide internet. I thought it was from someone else's rss feed, maybe via SU. If it was from someone on donationcoder.com pease do speak up!


Think you are safe ? This ought to bump you off your socks

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This is for those of you who feel that you have properly secured your home with good quality locks each night before you turn in.

Now almost any Tom, Dick and Harry can break into your house with no sign of forced entry which means your insurance company would just assume that you left your house unlocked and you deserved to be robbed or burgled and I certainly hope not injured.

I don't always turn on my alarm system, but I will certainly do so as this technique gain more traction on the internet.

Read it in Newsweek and watch it on youtube. I hesistated posting this here, in order to not help propagate this. But I think donationcoders need to know about this to better protect themselves.

Lockpicks See Security Flaw in Most Locks - Newsweek Technology - MSNBC.com
"Beware the 'Bump' Key
As lockpicking gains traction as a hobby, a surprisingly easy new technique has been circulating online and among hackers.

http://www.msnbc.msn.../1/displaymode/1098/
Watch the shocking video at http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=7Uv45y6vkcQ


Ask A Ninja?

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totally crack up videos.. like this one http://youtube.com/watch?v=OEmss2lg-ug - what is podcasting.. if you've got time to waste, you should watch some of the vids, you can of course view them on youtube as well..

Site: http://askaninja.com


Tony vs. Paul - The Coolest Stop Motion Video Ever Made?

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This stop-motion video (where individual frames are composed and then played back rapidly to generate an illusion of movement), is incredible, and shows what kind of brilliant work can be done by some dedicated individuals..  Pure fun and brilliant!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=AJzU3NjDikY


12th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition Results

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About the Competition
For the last twelve years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for newcomers to the genre, the competition is a chance to enjoy some of the best short adventure games available anywhere...

http://ifcomp.org/comp06/


Free Hugs Campaign Video.. Wow.. A Must See..

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Simple, wonderfull, uplifting.  Watch.

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4



Animator vs. Animation II -  Sequal to one of the best flash cartoons ever..

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You can watch the original Animator vs. Animation, one of the best flash cartoon animations ever: here.

Now comes the sequel!  Animator vs. Animation II.

Continue reading to see another great cartoon that surely influenced this one..


What Can You Do with 1 Sheet of Paper?

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It is absolutely amazing what some people can do with a sheet of paper.

http://www.oncotton....x/A4PAPERCUT_000.htm

Visit the link to see a ton of these amazing unique paper cretions which are all created from a single sheet of paper and are in fact related to the blank space in the paper (visit and it will make sense).

Different Ways To Tie Shoelaces, Knots, and Ties - with Multimedia

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Beautiful pages on tieing shoelaces, knots, ties, etc.
With images, charts, and movies.

http://www.fieggen.c...m/shoelace/tying.htm


Starship dimensions

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Ever wondered how big the ships are in Star Trek, Star Wars, and others compared to our puny 21st century objects? Check out Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions site:

This site is intended to allow science fiction fans to get an impression of the true scale of their favorite science fiction spacecraft by being able to compare ships across genres, as well as being able to compare them with contemporary objects with which they are probably familiar.


Roller Coaster of Death -- Machinima Video

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One of the best things about sim games is finding some way to turn them into violent death pits.

http://blog.wired.co...roller_coaster_.html

I could not put the title of this clip any better than the wired editor did.  My niece loved Roller Coaster tycoon but was very sad when we built a water pit and dropped one of the park visitors fell into it, who promptly drowned.  I wonder how she would feel about this experiment with a half-completed roller coaster..

Physics Games Website

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As a player I always wanted there to be a website that tracks physics-based games and highlights the best of them. Many of these titles remain obscure; I’m always discovering new, addictive games. Well, I grew tired of waiting for that website to appear and decided to start it up myself. I’m in this for the long haul. This page will become the definitive source for physics games information. I hope you enjoy your stay!

http://www.fun-motion.com/

Cool site for those who like games with realistic physics.

Save the web!

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What happens when Leslie Hall, Peter Pan and Tron Guy team up to save the web? I have no words to describe. I'm all for it. Watch the video.

http://www.wearetheweb.org


How to Tie a Tie Website

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My favourite tie-tying website: Learn How to Tie a Tie

Continue reading the rest of the entry and discuss..


Icon's Story: fantastically whimsical flash movie

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In the spirit of the amazing flash animator vs. animation movie, comes this extremely brilliant one (different author).

http://tordox.org/do...osoft/icon-story.swf


xkcd.com - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

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Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

http://xkcd.com/c111.html


Found Currency Experiment

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Last year around this time, I constantly passed loose change in the Quick Chek parking lot in Highland Park, NJ. No one ever thinks of picking up pennies cause they are worthless, but I started to see nickles and dimes on the ground, and I was wondering how much money that would come out to if you picked up all the change you found for a year.
Well, as of May 19th last year, I've been picking up any change that I saw on the ground (at the extremely high cost of of my dignity)
...

http://basicfunction...com/html/?postid=108


Quick Change Artists: How on God's Green Earth Do They Do this?

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This can't be real:
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-wUgnyGv0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-wUgnyGv0

Watch and amaze yourself as 2 artists get in and out of clothes faster than your eye can see!

Continue reading the rest of the entry and discuss..


foundmagazine.com: Very cool website of stuff found by others on the street

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We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles - anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life. Anything goes... (from Web site)

http://www.foundmaga...useaction=finds.home


Amazing Mario Brothers Epic Flash Opera Series - Incredible

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ok look, if you have played the mario brothers series you owe it to yourself to watch these animated movies.  sometimes you have to just sit back and appreciate the creativity and devotion on display by some people.


Watch now..


Interview with author here: http://eboredom.20m....interviews/leon.html

what amazed me most here was this guy's serious skills as a story teller.  i just finished part 5. wow.
caveat: if you've never player these games on a nintendo then these movies might not pack the same emotional punch.
discovered on monkeyfilter.com
(read 2 comments)

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