Most of the items sold only through television ads are of questionable value, at best, but every now and then one comes along that really does look useful. But is it too good to be true?
This Does It Work? page on the KRBC (NBC affiliate out of Abilene, Texas) site attempts to answer that question, with weekly hands-on reviews of new late-night TV gadgets. If nothing else, some of the lengths they go to in testing manufacturer's claims are quite entertaining.
This site will really make you wonder. There are five cards shown, and the system predicts which card you have chosen. If you (or someone you know) can't figure out how it works, you'll be losing sleep for days!
Vischeck, developed by two researchers at Stanford University, allows you to upload an image or specify a web page and see how it looks to people with various types of color blindness. Enter a few of your favorite sites and get a better idea of how others see the world!
Business 2.0 presents its list of the worst moments in the business world over the last year or so. Some of them are obvious and not-all-that-amusing (i.e. Enron), but quite a few would make for great urban legend material, if they weren't already true.
A zen video game for the 21st century? A file clerk's nightmare, turned into a web site? Your guess is as good as mine, but it is kind of interesting.
[Flash player required]
Google's search mechanism works such that, if enough people link to a given site with a phrase, for instance, Worst Site Ever, the site might come up as the first search result for Worst Site Ever. Get a whole bunch of sites to link to a site with a predetermined phrase and you've got yourself a Google Bomb.
This good non-technical article by Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain gives a concise overview of some of the issues surrounding the control of digital content (i.e. TV, movies, music, etc). If you have a computer at home, this will be affecting you in the next few years.
[NYT free registration required]
This is a wonderful article describing the rebirth of the arts in Afghanistan, focusing principally on Kabul.
[NYT free registration required]
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The average color in the universe is not the lovely pale turquoise as previously thought, but rather an extremely light beige, similar to coffee with a lot of cream. Here the scientists explain their new findings.