A little miscellany

  • This headline made me laugh. I often wonder if headline writers do this on purpose, as McDonald suggests, or not.
  • I find this face averaging tool fascinating. It’s one thing to pick a few attractive faces, average them, and see that the resulting face is more attractive than the majority of source faces, but it’s a whole other thing to purposefully pick the five or six least attractive faces, and then find out that the average is attractive. Then follow some of their links to lots of other fascinating research into faces. (I’ve been interested in the biology of attractiveness for a while, which is part of the reason I dug on Scott Westerfeld‘s Uglies trilogy, and people who’ve read that should find this extra interesting.)
  • You know, a Midlands accent sounds almost indistinguishable from a Melbourne accent to me. Is it just me? Anyway, I got a kick out of this “tour” of English accents:

    You can see the rest of the world here.

  • Apparently, according to current medical research, I am using caffeine correctly. “People who take small amounts of caffeine regularly during the day may be able to avoid falling asleep and perform well on cognitive tests without affecting their nighttime sleep habits.” So, the fact that I don’t hit myself with coffee in the morning, but rather start a consistent drinking of less caffeinated beverages that goes through the day.
  • I try to keep an open mind about food, but deep-fried pizza is just wrong, traditional or not. That being said, there is nothing wrong with making a panzerotti stuffed with donair meat. I’m just saying.
  • One of the main attractions was the writing, so maybe Veronica Mars could work as a comic, if it had the same writers, or writers of the same quality. Still, another big part of the attraction was the performance and delivery of what was written, especially by Bell, Dohring, and Colantoni, and it’s hard to imagine that any comic version won’t suffer by comparison to the screen one.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.