There's the rub: the Vibra-Finger

Yikes. What a creepy personal gadget. And it isn't even what you think it is (or is it?)

The Vibra-Finger was spotted on Retrospace

5/25/10 Tree Bark

This tree was next to the street where I parked to pick up Julia at school today, and when I looked at it more closely, it reminded me of an impressionist painting. The colors were astounding! And I liked the foliage and flowers in the background, which repeated some of the same green and red colors.

Forget about Kung Fu Panda: here's Kung Fu bear.

OK, as of now I'll start believing in reincarnation. This bear must have been a Kung Fu master in a past life. I mean, I can't do this stuff!

Initially I saw the shorter version (to which a fitting soundtrack has been added), but as that was edited I admit that I was a bit suspicious of somebody simply having cut the footage cleverly.  But it looks like the clever one is the bear, after all.

Havana bride

Wow. You don't often get to see such photos on National Geographic. 

'Bride, Havana, Cuba', by Dmitri Markine. Source: National Geographic.

Ain't that right.

'Love' won't get you an Oscar

I love Wordle. Not only is it one of the best online toys I've come across, but it also allows you to present word counts as statistical graphs in a fun manner. Take, for instance, the BBC's Wordle experiment with Eurovision winning lyrics (see post below). Now, whereas the biggest winner - so far as words are concerned - in Eurovision is 'love', to win an Oscar for best picture, you need either 'American', 'Man' or 'Men', 'Best', 'One', or 'Godfather' in the title. In fact, if you want an Oscar for best picture, 'love' won't get you anywhere. See for yourself:

Here's a larger view on Wordle. The list comes from Wikipedia.

'Love': twelve points; 'amour': douze points

All you need is love, especially if you're a Eurovision contestant. The BBC had the brilliant idea to feed the lyrics of all winning songs of the Eurovision contest, from its inception in 1956 till now, into Wordle website - a magic online toy for creating word clouds (think of tag clouds) on the basis of how often a word occurs in a given text. Once common words like 'and', 'I' were removed, the most frequent word in Euroschmaltzy winning songs turned out to be 'Love'.

To be more precise, of the 12,299 different words that make up the BBC's own collection of 54 years' worth of Eurovision's winning lyrics, 'love' accounts for 2%. Not all that surprising, if you think that love is embedded in the Eurovision logo, is it.

...And in case you're itching to find out what this year's lyrics word-cloud looks like, here it is:

On the basis of word frequency alone, the BBC predicts that this year's German entry, 'Satellite', has pretty decent odds for winning: it features the word 'love' no less than 26 times. Alles Liebe.

(Article and images from the BBC)