Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

How do you pronounce the surname of that artist who liked sunflowers and starry nights? I suspect I say it wrongly… but not sure. Crowdsourcing will have the answer!

[Poll #1820257]

(And did you know he lived at various times in Brixton, Ramsgate and Isleworth? I didn't until recently.)

Would you like some delicious tasty vinegar in your beer? Don't knock it until you've tried it! Interesting experiment. The first result -- people liked the blind taste more than the idea -- is not surprising these days, we know people are prejudiced against such bizarre-sounding concepts. And the second result, that people liked the taste less if they knew vinegar was going to be in it, is only mildly surprising. But the third, that people still preferred it if they were told afterwards that vinegar was in it, I found remarkable. As the abstract puts it (my italics), "Disclosure of the secret ingredient significantly reduced preference only when the disclosure preceded tasting, suggesting that disclosure affected preferences by influencing the experience itself, rather than by acting as an independent negative input or by modifying retrospective interpretation of the experience."

Birmingham atheists and Wiccans under the council's cosh -- what I find surprising here is that the "system allows staff to look at websites relating to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions". Why? Is this a common exception at workplaces that generally ban leisure Web use? If so, then clearly religious websites are the places to site your games. Surely it can't be that so many of the Council staff have work that involves religious sensitivity etc, they found it easier to make a blanket allowance?

Thomas Doyle makes what are basically snowglobes without (usually) the snow, but each depicts an enigmatic scene. Somehow one gets drawn into speculating who these people are, what they're doing here, etc. It's not obvious to me why I find these so appealing, which is a good sign in itself.

Farah Mendlesohn wrote this interesting essay about the Out of this World series of anthologies. These were pretty much my introduction to "proper" SF -- I read them out of the library, around the age of 11 -- for which I count myself rather lucky. She expresses very well what made them remarkable. I have to admit that at the time I didn't know quite what to make of the stories by Calvino etc that were included alongside the genre greats and Eastern European obscurities, but they all helped form me as an SF reader and gave me the important sense of the artificality of genre boundaries. I now want to track down the books, because there are a number of stoies mentioned here that I haven't seen since but remember loving.

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.
  

" I connected a gas generator and air compressor to buckets of paint and secured them into the seats of a Scrambler amusement park ride. Once the ride was in motion, paint sprayed out of the benches onto vinyl tarps placed underneath. The result is a series of enormous hypocycloid designs which recorded the hidden patterns created by the ride as it turned."

Pictures of the results here: there are videos of it taking place, too.

I think though that to be in keeping with the materials she should have used buckets of different-coloured vomit, rather than paint.