Category Archives: Fun

Fun

Facebook makes you dumb.

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It’s official because a report from the Ohio State University has concluded from a study of 219 US graduates and undergraduates that students who use Facebook had a significantly lower grade point average than those who did not.

FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.

The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.

Of course, this is a ridiculous assertion because it basically boils down to the same thing: students are easily distracted from studying. If it weren’t for Facebook, the students would probably be playing video games, or partying or doing something else.

Or check out this alternative explanation from Chris Matyszczyk:

But I have a suspicious and entirely unscientific feeling that all this research may tell us so far is that bookwormy, people-uncomfortable types do well in school tests.

So nothing’s changed, right?

Fun

Pointless inventions

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I managed to resist the urge to post about this outdoor treadmill when it first got posted on QT3, but the ropeless jumping rope has pushed me over the edge. Basically it seems to be a matched set of two weighted jumping rope handles with fancy electronics embedded to count your jumps and calculate how long you’ve been jumping. Except that it doesn’t have an actual rope connecting the two handles, so you won’t need to worry about tripping, or getting your rhythm wrong, or maintaining proper form. Because, hey, actually jumping with a rope is too hard and simply jumping in place without any equipment is just stupid.

Fun, Science

Exciting! Safe! Radioactive toys!

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I saw this link on QT3 today. As the original poster says, this is certainly a reminder of a simpler and more innocent era that Fallout 3 captured so well. Imagine Polonium-210, the same substance that Russian assassins likely used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, being sold as part of a science kit for children! I guess the manufacturers were really serious about properly educating young children about the different types of radiation. They even included a form that you could use to order new radiation sources once you’d used yours up. How handy is that? Even better, buy this set and if you find a natural uranium source with it, the U.S. government will pay you a $10,000.00 prize!

Of course, what they didn’t know then was how dangerous radiation really was. Nowadays it seems that not a day goes by without something familiar being classified as a cancer risk. Incidentally, for anyone interested in buying one of these things, it’s worth noting that since Polonium 210 has a half-life of only 130 days and the set was made available only from 1951 to 1952, I can’t imagine there being much of it left even if you could find one of these very rare sets intact.

Fun

Can you hear this?

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A while back I wrote a post on how shopkeepers in the UK were using a device that continuously emits a high-frequency whine to deter youths from loitering near their business, while being inaudible to older adults. Someone on QT3 recently posted a link to a website that allows visitors to download and play something similar, so that you can hear for yourself if the sound is audible to you. It turns out that despite being 33 years old, both my wife and I could hear this sound, and, yes, both of us find it extremely unpleasant and annoying.

Someone else then posted that students in the UK were using similar sounds as the ringtone of their mobile phones, allowing them to ring in class while being inaudible to their teachers. I can only imagine the barely suppressed glee in the classroom as all the students are able to plainly hear something that the teacher can’t notice at all. You can download these ringtones here and see at what frequency your ability to hear the sound stops. Both my wife and I could hear only up to the 15 kHz version which is consistent with the website’s claim that it can only be heard by those aged 40 years and below.

Try it for yourself and let me know your results.

Fun, Games

John Dvorak needs to learn “WASD”

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UPDATE: Apparently I forgot to add a link to the article in question the first time around. Added now.

So when was the last time PC Mag columnist John Dvorak wrote something that wasn’t pure idiocy? Here’s a line from his latest:

And when you try to take on one of these games as an adult you soon realize that there is too much weird crud, like “hit the A button while moving the joystick forward while pulling the trigger while moving the mouse with your right hand and left clicking.” That’s just to walk forward!

As someone on QT3 posted in reply, all I need to do on my keyboard is press “W” to walk forward. Perhaps Dvorak needs to get himself a better keyboard. And which game needs you to use both a joystick and a mouse at the same time? Even the use of the word “joystick” reveals how out of touch Dvorak is. It was emblematic of the Atari 2600 days, but now that flight simulators have been relegated to a niche enthusiast community, few people actually use joysticks now. The closest modern equivalent are the sticks that are now selling out due to the recent release of Street Fighter 4, but those are now called “fighting sticks”.

Also, look carefully at the last line of his column:

A game like Garage Band or Guitar Hero isn’t the answer. But what is?

Uh, “Garage Band”? Someone should take this guy to one side and kindly explain to him that he’s just making a laughingstock of himself at this point.

Fun

Giant Spider attacks Liverpool

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I’ve been terribly busy at work lately and don’t the time to write any lengthy posts. In the meantime, here’s a photo of a giant spider attacking Liverpool. In reality, it’s a giant robot spider created by a French group called La Machine as a giant piece of street theatre. As this article notes, using public funds in this way in these depressed economic times is sort of questionable, but then again public funds have rarely been used to make something more spectacular than this. Check out the original article for tons of good photos.