Friday, February 26, 2010

Steampunk Style Test

Not so sure about the pith helmet ... I was hoping for a deerstalker.
 

Your result for The Steampunk Style Test...

The Explorer

29% Elegant, 62% Technological, 33% Historical, 72% Adventurous and 6% Playful!

You are the Explorer, the embodiment of steampunk’s adventuring spirit. For you, clothing should be rugged and reliable, and just as functional as it is attractive. You probably prefer khaki or leather, and your accessories are as likely to include weapons as technological gizmos. You probably wear boots and gloves, and maybe a pith helmet. Most of what you wear is functional, and if you happen to wear goggles people had better believe that you use them. In addition to Victorian exploration gear, your outfit probably includes little knickknacks from your various travels. Above all, you are a charming blend of rugged Victorian daring and exotic curiosity.



Try our other Steampunk test here.

Take The Steampunk Style Test at HelloQuizzy



Friday, February 19, 2010

Music discovery service: TuneGlue

You can't listen to new artists you find, but it brings up some surprising and intriguing results.

TuneGlue Helps You Find New Tunes You'd Like by Mapping Music Connections - music discovery - Lifehacker
You start building a web by searching for an artist. In our sample web above we started with Iggy Pop. When you click on your first node, you can perform a variety of actions with the node but the most important action is expanding the node. Expanding adds more nodes to the web, spun off of the node you expanded. By expanding nodes you can generate connections between artists based on listening patterns. Iggy Pop, for example, links to The Stooge which in turn links to the New York Dolls. Curious how we got from Iggy Pop to Garbage? We went from Iggy Pop through Patti Smith -> PJ Harvey -> Tori Amos -> Alanis Morissette -> The Cranberries -> Garbage.


Now is the summer of our sweet content ...

The Battle of Bosworth Field, where Richard III met his fate at the hands of ... um ... Edmund Blackadder?  has been located.  The boar's head badge may have belonged to Edmund himself :).



BBC News - New Battle of Bosworth Field site revealed
Bosworth, fought in 1485, which saw the death of Richard III, was believed to have taken place on Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire.


The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariners

Unexpected find: Hominids with seafaring technology advanced enough to sail to Crete.  Wonder if they had pirates, too?

Primitive Humans Conquered Sea, Surprising Finds Suggests
Crete has been surrounded by vast stretches of sea for some five million years. The discovery of the hand ax suggests that people besides technologically modern humans—possibly Homo heidelbergensis—island-hopped across the Mediterranean tens of thousands of millennia earlier than expected.