Glittery birthday card from last year (from my grandmother).

A map of EuroDisney, found alphabetically next to a map of Eurasia.

“Vergence” by Tina Frank

A gallery of animated gifs of fake rocks.  Click to make them spin.

Via: Artificial Rock Factory

New York City has a data project called “RIP” or “Rat Information Portal“.  At least they have a sense of humor about it.

The image above (50 Cent and Jay-Z) are from Tahir Hemphill‘s “Hip-Hop Word Count” project.  Using seven criteria, the software:

…estimates the education level needed to understand each rhyme as well as, rates the artistic sophistication employed through the metaphors, similes, cultural references, consonantal/vocalic alliteration and overall pattern of each rhyme. We calculate the final score by averaging the syntactic (readability measures) and semantic (artistic sophistication) scores of each rhyme. On a scale from 0 (illiterate) to 20 (post-graduate degree).

The result is tabulated into a form that looks like this:

Interestingly, President Obama’s energy policy speech ranked lower than a Jay-Z album.

Studies by Woody Vasulka and Brian O’Reilly using the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor, a video processor from the 1970′s.

Disaster Area, claimed to be the loudest band in the universe, and in fact the loudest sound of any kind, anywhere. So loud is this band that the audience usually listens from the safe distance of thirty seven miles away in a well-built concrete bunker.

Hitchhikers.wikia.com adds that the “musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet – or more frequently around a completely different planet”.