Cost of Living - short film

Have you seen "Cost of Living" yet?
Are you a sci-fi fan?
What are you waiting for?

COST OF LIVING from BenDavid Grabinski on Vimeo.
http://www.foindustries.com
@bdgrabinski
Please play loud.

Alternative Literature

If you are not familiar with XKCD web comic, you should be http://xkcd.com/

Boo! Facebook (again)

Starting today, Facebook is no longer allowing the connection of the Facebook notes section to blogs to automatically push new blog posts to Facebook. So much for being social and playing nice, huh?

Bad Facebook, bad - I would swat you with a newspaper if I could.

Tom Lehrer on the Electric Company

Adverbs



Silent E



Snore, Sniff, and Sneeze

New Blogger Templates Offer Something a Little Different

Blogger has released what they call Dynamic Views. It allows the viewer of the website to switch between views and experience the blog in different ways.

Live examples:

• Undopaste.com (current) (mosaic)
• Fathades.com (current) (flipcard) (snapshot)

The only real drag is that you have to change your basic template to one of the set.If you have done serious HTML and CSS design edits to your Blogger site you're going to lose them. However, they mention that they will "be adding more ways to customize Dynamic Views int he coming weeks."

The current option list is:

• Classic (Gmail): A modern twist on a traditional template, with infinite scrolling and images that load as you go
• Flipcard (M loves M) - Your photos are tiled across the page and flip to reveal the post title
• Magazine (Advanced Style) - A clean, elegant editorial style layout 
• Mosaic (Crosby’s Kitchen) - A mosaic mix of different sized images and text
• Sidebar (Blogger Buzz Blog) - An email inbox-like view with a reading page for quick scrolling and browsing
• Snapshot (Canelle et Vanille) - An interactive pinboard of your posts 
• Timeslide (The Bleary-Eyed Father) - A horizontal view of your posts by time period

Read all about it on Blogger Buzz: Dynamic Views: seven new ways to share your blog with the world

Google's Ngram Viewer

Recently watched the following TED talk: "What we learned from 5 million books"


Neat!
So I did a few searches, and these are my results:

• fact vs. fiction: fact occurs much more often, but has taken a decidedly sharp down turn since the early 1970s. Also, fiction is on the rise.
• happy vs. sad: happy is on a serious decline. It bottomed out in the mid-late 1980s (a little cold war scare anyone?), but does seem to be on the rise again. Sad rose to a height in the late 1860s, but has been on the decline, except for a small rise in the late 1920s, ever since.
• ain't vs. isn't: these two words have an interesting relationship. there was a time just before 1900 that ain't was more prevalent. Then rightfully so isn't was used more often. Then just after 1940 they both enjoyed a wild spike in usage and both shared a huge dip in usage in the early 1960s. Also ain't remains in print, isn't has spiked beyond its 1940 era boom - thankfully.
• yes vs. no: is a most interesting graph. It seems that yes has never had much ground, and no was very famous. However no has been steadly decreasing since a peak around 1840.
• pencil vs. pen: it looks that the pen has had the upper hand for two hundred years, but both are in a steady decline.
• disco vs. funk: beginning in 1970 funk began in the lead and then there was a crutial tipping point in 1976 and disco soared while funk stagnated. However, funk enjoyed a resurgance in the 1990s, but by the time 1999 rolled around it was on the down beat again.

And contentious for grammarians is it email or e-mail ?? From 1980 - 2000 there has been a steady increase in the use of email!! yea, I win!

The homepage is http://books.google.com/ngrams/ - go explore.

Claymation Humor

These were posted by YouTube member scuzzbopper. Visit that channel for lots more. I love the rabbit in the second one.