Misc

Various things that have caught my eye just lately:

• Map of blondeness across Europe -- from strange_maps. Nothing very surprising revealed, but I think this is a really nice presentation of the information. Notable that eg. the division in England more or less follows the Danelaw boundary. I suspect some of this is guesswork though, I don't suppose all these countries keep hair colour data. (On the source site there's a similar one for light eye colour, which not surprisingly is fairly similar.)
• Analysis by Google of the way that HTML is coded on "a sample of slightly over a billion documents". OK, this is only really going to be interesting if you write web pages yourself. Plenty of illuminating notes such as "Typos were quite common; the td element, for example, had more pages with widht, witdh, aling, valing, with, and heigth attributes than it had pages with headers attributes." and "There are more <o:p> elements (from Microsoft Office) on the Web than there are <h6> elements." And my favourite: "One conclusion one can draw from the spread of attributes used on the body element is that authors don't care about what the specifications say. Of these top twenty attributes, nine are completely invalid, and five have been deprecated for nearly eight years, half the lifetime of the Web so far."
• The Culture Archive is basically a collection of old advertising pictures on various subjects. Here's the page about men's ties, and here's the page on beer.
• Chipwrapper is a simple little app which just pulls the current top headline off all the main UK papers. (Currently mostly about the quaint affair of Mr John Darwin.) And there are variosu RSS feeds, etc, that you can pull off it for your particular needs.
• "They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!" I was hoping there was something clever involved, but looking at the demo, it seems that they've just compressed the image horizontally. That really is quite pathetic!
• I'm not sure if this is RSS talker or RS Stalker, but either way it's quite clever I think. It lets you set up an RSS feed to track the price of Amazon products. Which change much more frequently than you might think. No adverts, they don't even take any of your personal data -- their angle is that if you click through to buy the item from the feed, they get the affiliate fee, which seems fair enough. You can even have the RSS track your entire wishlist, if you tell them your email address.