ketchup

One of a small bunch of online dictionaries, the Pseudodictionary distinguishes itself for having quite possible the most made-up words or fictional definitions.

Aero mock-ups, inc. is a small crew of people in the business of making big things… well, convincing fakes at least. They offer, for rental and purchase, entirely believable and moderately functional replicas of airplane interiors that are as ready to film as they are for seating. Their client roster features both the airline industry and Hollywood (as seen in Fight club, Thomas Crown affair, Charlie’s angels, and more). Options include custom seating, big screens for the in-flight movie and even peanut and beverage carts.

All that’s missing, really, is the altitude.

Curiousity in academia is a good thing, particularly when it comes to finding weird web pages and sites. Professor and author Clifford Pickover takes that “curiousity” and “weird” a little far, though, in his links list updated several times daily with the things that tickle his (and his contributor’s) fancies and more sinister sensibilities. Not everything linked there is worth re-visiting, but to skip them altogether would be bad to all but the most devoted seekers of banality.

Compound interest is an interesting thing. Given enough time, even a couple pennies can turn into billions of dollars with the right rate. Great riches aren’t merely a possibility, but a certainty. Also falling under such a description is time travel. No longer the darling of science fiction but a proven eventuality (at least if you believe Einstein, Sagan and Kaku) given the right technologies.

It was really only a matter of time before somebody put the two together. The Time Travel Fund has been established as a non-profit corporation, asking only $10 to join. That ten dollars ensures somebody that when he or she dies, moments before natural death, he or she will be retrieved by time travelers and brought back to the distant future to begin life anew. Compound interest makes it possible, because, though it is agreed that two-way time travel is possible, it is not a feasible technology with the resources currently or even soon at humanity’s disposal. Once time travel enters the equation, the wait doesn’t really matter, after all.

The “information superhighway”: buzzword extraordinaire that promised boundless information and innovation capabilities. Institutions such as “think tanks” gained popularity and the “information economy” sprung up. So is the world better for it? That may be a difficult call, but one result is obvious: everything and everybody is awash with new ideas, some good, many bad. Collecting those ideas, injecting intelligence and sometimes humor into them, is the (cleverly named) Half Bakery.

The Bakery’s a collaborative repository of “ideas” for innovations and inventions, as well as comments on them and more annotations. Some are obviously (or subtly) tinged with humor and satire, including the cellphone trebuchet for unwanted mobiles and ana-graham crackers for scrabble snacking fun. Others are straight-up good ideas for the betterment of, well, something or other. All of them are worth a glance and many a vote or comment.

Identifont provides a unique service: after prompting a series of simple questions, the site shows, with reasonable accuracy, a small number of fonts described by the answers. Would-be typographers with only specific words to work from can get customized questions just for those letters, and less specific searches are available, including sortings by family and designer. Identifont links to some high quality free fonts, but its bread and butter are referrals made for the fonts it recommends. Otherwise the site’s free to use and enjoy.

The phrase “under construction” appeared on sites and pages seemingly minutes after widespread access to the web was available. Mixed metaphors abounded everywhere on the burgeoning hypertext network, with surfers browsing pages that were under construction, or sites that had been published. Anyway, one site that took “under construction” a little more literally than others is Mr Wong’s Soup’Partments, a virtual skyscraper of user-submitted pixel art. Every floor of the isometrically-angled structure is done by someone else and carefully assembled by the enigmatic Mr Wong, a pixel art enthusiast and “resident” of the building’s penthouse. The rent is free and building materials are cheap…

Unfortunately, Mr Wong stopped accepting submissions in 2004, but he maintains the building up to that point.

Ever kept an email because the attachment was funny? Or reached quota from having too many Flash games stored? Now there’s a better way. Lycos UK maintains a repository of all those meme files floating around in a categorized and rated database, free for all and much easier than sending actual files. Every potential attachment can be downloaded, viewed, linked and emailed directly from the site. Everything from childish flash games to photoshopped celebrity photos and raunchy
movies can be found and done with what will. So stop sending those huge files to each other.

Sometimes the marriage of creativity and technology produces beneficial and good children, such as Speak ‘n’ Spell, Teddy Ruxpin and the Sony Playstation. And other times the offspring are hideously ugly twits who never grow up and amount to anything good. Such is the case of Pinocchia, a massive online gallery of people, primarily attractive women, with artificially elongated noses (i.e. enhanced with Photoshop).

Just because anyone can publish unique content on the web doesn’t mean that everyone does. Copying a site is as easy as reading its source and saving its images. Popular word processing programs are capable of editing and re-editing pages without would-be-webmasters (or should it be wanna-be?) ever touching a line of HTML. And with millions, if not billions, of sites published it is nearly imposssible to ever change across a duplicated site and its original version. But such encounters do occur, and Pirated Sites keeps track of them.

Aiming to reveal site and interface hijacking, Pirated Sites relies on intrepid surfers, the site’s founders Tim Murtaugh and Scott Devendorf and sharp-eyed victims of copying to spot theft and near-clones. The site has an archive of copied sites with screenshots of originals and offenders, and also provides information on web standards compliance and good design practice.