flickering pictures

Nathan over at FlowingData has stumbled upon yet another neat-o tool that’s as unscientific as it is fun to play with:

StateStats is like Google Insights but on a state level. Type in a search term and get Google search levels with correlations to certain “metrics” like obesity or support for Obama.

Since he’s a mature sort, […]

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I’m a little pressed for time, and I didn’t have the foresight to set up a delayed post last night, so just a little one today:
Hardware giant Logitech has just announced the sale of its one billionth mouse, meaning it has made one mouse for every 6.7 people on the planet.
If a mouse cable is […]

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The last 10 search terms that led to this fine site were:

Who exactly needs to know whether insects poop at 12:34 in the morning? Why would someone seek out “weird creepy asian flash games”? And who’s pondering the pros and cons of keeping Italian lizards as pets?
Sadly, I’ll likely never know. You […]

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The good people at FlowingData (I’m really getting hooked on that site) have put together a neato animated bar chart to show the ups and downs of gasoline prices across eight U.S. regions since April 1993. Back then, the price the pump was a mere $1.07 per gallon — or a piddling 28 cents […]

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The New York Times has put together a nifty interactive timeline-map highlighting how many medals each country has won in every Summer Olympics since 1896. You can click on a year to see the medal counts from a given Olympiad by country, and view the results by geographic distribution (as above) or as a […]

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That number shoots up to 40 per cent among teens who actually admit to having had sex. I’m not sure how the rest of them contracted their diseases, but I’m guessing public toilet seats didn’t have much to do with it.
And those figures don’t even reflect gonorrhea, warts, HIV/AIDS or other nasties that researchers […]

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Interested yet?
Having cured cancer and solved world hunger, U.S. researchers have focused their skills and public research dollars on an age-old quandary: why is James Bond sexy?
From the New Scientist:

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, […]

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Wow, there’s just really no way to say that concisely, is there?
I always said that when I finally put together my very own blog, I’d never apologize if I didn’t have a chance to post for a couple of days. Then again, I never expected that there would be hundreds of you to apologize […]

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