Category: Unfiled

Favell Lee Mortimer

Travellers are afraid of passing through Arabia, lest the Arabs should rob and murder them; and no one has ever been able to conquer the Arabs. The Arabs are very proud, and will not bear the least affront. Sometimes one man says to another, "The wrong side of your turban is out." This speech is considered an affront never to be forgotten. The Arabs are so unforgiving and revengeful that they will seek to kill a man year after year. One man was observed to carry about a small dagger. He said his reason was, he was hoping some day to meet his enemy and kill him. Of what religion are this revengeful people? The Mahomedan.
From "Far Off; or, Asia and Australia Described." by F. Lee Mortimer, A.K.A. "The Author of 'The Peep Of Day'". [via the Little Gray Book Lectu

Google Dreams of Electric Sheep

Dreamlines is an attempt to visualize dreaming as a process. Provide the site a few keywords from your dream, and Dreamlines fetches the Google Image results for those words. Instead of displaying the results, the images are used to alter the vector of 1500 autonomous particles, whose trail composes the image you're shown when the process is complete. Confused? Try reading the official explanation instead. [via Info Aesthetics]

8,333 1/3 Sheets of 100% Virgin Copier Paper Grow in Brooklyn

  • 1 ton of uncoated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees
  • 1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees
  • A pallet of copier paper (20-lb. sheet weight, or 20#) contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton. Therefore:
    • 1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses 0.6 trees
    • 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets
    • 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!)
  • 1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines like National Geographic and many others) uses a little more than 15 trees (15.36)
  • 1 ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper (used for newsmagazines and most catalogs) uses nearly 8 trees (7.68)
    • [Straight Dope]

    Canned Vegetables and Sooper-Sekrit Vodka

    Deborah Solomon always delivers the goods. The President's Chef has a new book out, and the NYT Questions feature pulls some of the strangest quotes we've seen. As if you needed help, the wierdest stuff is in bold:

    ...It doesn't sound as if the Bushes believe in dieting. No. It's a personal choice. I think we're too conscious about what we see and what we read in the newspaper, rather than thinking for our own.
    Is that why some of your recipes call for canned vegetables?