Pot-Pourri

I have a few interesting links to post today, so no specific title.

First one is the popularity frequency of baby names over time on an interactive graph. This is a cool way to present information, and it's information that everyone could find interesting - even females who probably don't pay attention to half my posts (as evidenced by the lack of comments from girls)! You can type in your name and see how it popular it is over time. For example, check out Mariah....it get popular in the 1990s, takes a dip in the early 2000's, but then rises again last year. You could almost say it mirrors her career; how she became less popular with Glitter and then made a comeback with her last album. Coincidence?
       Unfortunately, you can't visually compare the popularity of two different names, because the vertical scale is constantly changing. It appears that there is a general downward trend in all names. Since they only analyze the top 1000 frequently used names for a given year, this seems to indicate that there are more unique names being given (eg Roshanda?) or maybe there is an increase in immigrants giving their childs unique cultural names. Or maybe some other theory that you can theorize in my comments if you wish.

Anyone like ASCII art? Well this site can take any (60x50 pixel) picture and convert into an ASCII representations. I put in a cropped pic from my MSN Live/Facebook profile and here are the results:

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Might look funny in your RSS feed reader. I also had some trouble rendering it in Blogger...it looks a bit better if you submit the pictures on the actual site...

Sony has recently had a big problem with their batteries blowing up. Scientific American has a good explanation with pretty pictures of why this happens. At work, I was involved with designing a battery charger for rechargeable batteries, but ran into a lot of difficulties...so apparantly it's not so easy afterall.

Fantasy Basketball season is starting once again! It's always exciting at the start of the year with the draft and so much promise, but gets harder to keep up when your team starts sucking. I always do ok, not great, not badly and as a result I have yet to win my pool. Boo. This year we're attempting a live draft with the Martingrove crew (10 people!), which should be interesting considering that one of our members is in UK!

Enough links for now...weekend is coming up! I will not be coming in to Toronto this weekend for the first time in 2-3 months... It's because Kitty is coming up for a visit! We're going to hit up King Crab on Friday because I won a gift certificate at a work auction. Then on Saturday we're going to hit up the newly renovated Bomber! Anyone want to come down and join us???